The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office moves to try to reopen the investigation into Operation Kitchen, the parapolice plot hatched in 2013 in the Ministry of the Interior to spy on the popular ex-treasurer Luis Bárcenas and snatch compromising documentation for senior PP officials. The public ministry has supported the resources of the popular accusations (PSOE and Podemos) to resume the investigations and charge María Dolores de Cospedal, general secretary of the party between 2008 and 2018. The accusations requested that the case be reopened after the publication, the last May, of a series of audios from the retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo that point to it.
The battle of the accusations to resume this case continues, despite the setbacks. Judge Manuel García-Castellón, instructor of the National Court, already rejected in September to reopen the investigation into the maneuvers against Bárcenas and the alleged involvement of Cospedal, considering that Villarejo’s recordings did not contribute anything new against her. “The support of the accusation is reduced almost nuclear to a few minutes of an audio cut of which not only its origin is unknown, but also any circumstance and context,” the magistrate then stated.
After knowing that resolution of Judge García-Castellón, Anti-Corruption renounced appealing it on its own initiative to the Criminal Chamber. However, he left the door open to support the allegations of the popular accusations if they decided to go to a higher instance. And so the time has come. “In relation to the appeal of Podemos against the order of September 13, 2022 [del juez]who rejected the reopening of this separate piece, […] The revocation of the appealed order is of interest”, the public prosecutor states in a brief of just two paragraphs presented on January 24, to which EL PAÍS has had access. The State Attorney had already shown her support for the Podemos initiative in October.
From the beginning, the Prosecutor’s Office has defended that Kitchen is part of a much broader plot hatched by the PP from 2009 to boycott the judicial investigation of the Gürtel case, the corrupt network of Francisco Correa that nested within the party. In the opinion of the public ministry, among other maneuvers, this plot included tipping off the formation of confidential information and, already in 2013, the launch of the spying operation on Bárcenas. An initiative in which, according to Anticorruption, Cospedal “intervened” indicatively, which he considers as the key piece that connects with the heart of the political force, then in the Government.
Throughout many writings, prosecutors have described the threads that lead to the former general secretary of the PP. Among others, Andrés Gómez Gordo, a commissioner who allegedly participated in the first contacts with Sergio Ríos, then Bárcenas’ driver, to capture him as a confidant. Gómez Gordo was a man very close to Cospedal, since he worked for her as her adviser during the popular leader’s stage as president of Castilla-La Mancha. In addition, the politician and her husband – the businessman Ignacio López del Hierro – maintained a fluid relationship with Villarejo for years, with whom they often dispatched.
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These usual contacts between the couple and the commissioner have not only been reflected in the notes in the diaries seized from Villarejo, but also in the telephone records. In a report from the Internal Affairs Unit (UAI) of the Police, more than 70 telephone contacts between the police and the environment of the former general secretary of the PP during the months of the spying operation on Bárcenas are detailed. These communications coincide with the commissioner’s notes in his personal notebooks, where he wrote the content of the conversations and his impressions. Among other notes, just the day the parapolice deployment is activated, according to the judge, Cospedal personally calls the commissioner and they talk for 19 seconds. Villarejo then reflected in his agenda: “Cospe: Very fly with the summons. I advised him to call Chisco.” Chisco was Francisco Martínez, then Secretary of State for Security, to whom the instruction grants the role of coordinator of Operation Kitchen.
Despite everything, magistrate García-Castellón left Cospedal out of the investigations in July 2021 and circumscribed all the responsibility of Kitchen to the Ministry of the Interior. In a decision endorsed in May 2022 by the Criminal Chamber, the instructor prosecuted, among others, the then political head of that portfolio, Jorge Fernández Díaz; to his ex number two, Francisco Martinez; six commissioners, such as Eugenio Pino (Police chief during the Rajoy Government) and José Manuel Villarejo; and Bárcenas’ former driver, Sergio Ríos.
The accusations were then resigned, but they saw how a new path was opened just a few days later. EL PAÍS published some unpublished conversations recorded by Commissioner Villarejo in the first half of 2013 with Cospedal, where they allegedly talk about how to hinder the investigation into the Barcenas papers (the accounting b of the PP). “The little notebook [de Bárcenas]… it would be better to be able to stop it”, the former general secretary is heard saying. Based on these new audios, the PSOE unsuccessfully asked magistrate García-Castellón to reopen the case to target the former popular leader again. Now, the decision is in the hands of the Criminal Chamber.
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