Jorge Fernández Díaz, Minister of the Interior during the Government of Mariano Rajoy (PP), has moved to try to annul the evidence that surrounds him due to his alleged involvement in the Kitchen case, the operation supposedly concocted in 2013 within that ministry and the National Police to spy on the former popular treasurer Luis Bárcenas with the aim of stealing sensitive documentation that could harm the party. In the defense brief sent on March 13 by his lawyer to the National Court, Fernández Díaz asks to invalidate the recordings intercepted by retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, which prove part of the plot.
The lawyer of the former leader of the PP wants the court, which must judge him along with another dozen former senior officials of the Interior and the Police, not to take into account the audios found in the searches carried out at Villarejo's house, where the former agent accumulated a huge amount of recordings. In these you can hear, for example, how the commissioner talks with Sergio Ríos, Bárcenas' former driver, whom the corrupt network captured as a confidant. The defense also detracts from any value to the mobile messages that Francisco Martínez, former Secretary of State for Security and former right-hand man of the minister, took to a notary, and which supposedly show that Fernández Díaz was aware of Operation Kitchen.
In the ruling of the first trial against Villarejo, which last July sentenced the commissioner to 19 years in prison for other cases of espionage commissioned by individuals and companies, the National Court already accepted the validity of the intercepted audios as evidence. “Such conversations appear as an effective means of evidence to be taken into account in conjunction with others,” the court said then.
Fernández Díaz faces a request from the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office for 15 years in prison for his alleged participation in the parapolice operation. Like the investigating judge, Manuel García-Castellón, the public ministry maintains that the politician was aware of the spying on Bárcenas. What's more, the magistrate places the former minister at the top of the plot: “On a date that could not be determined between 2012 and 2013, Fernández Díaz apparently urged Francisco Martínez, [secretario de Estado Seguridad] to launch a mission aimed at obtaining information and documentation that could be in the possession of Bárcenas, in order to remove said material from the judicial authority [que investigaba el caso Gürtel, sobre la red corrupta liderada por Francisco Correa y que anidó en el seno del PP]”.
However, in Fernández Díaz's defense brief, to which EL PAÍS has had access, his lawyer maintains that all of these accusations are “assertions and conjectures that derive from an interested, biased and voluntaristic interpretation of the facts.” The former minister repeats that he did not know of the existence of Operation Kitchen and that, furthermore, he could not have any “special interest or motivation in a police operation aimed at stealing information” from the Gürtel case, since “his name has never been related to this matter.” “Fernández Díaz was not affected or harmed by the result of the judicial investigation into the Bárcenas papers“says his lawyer.
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The thesis of the former Interior leader revolves around the idea that the PP was really, according to the accusations, the great beneficiary of the plot and that he was not in charge of the conservative formation. In this sense, the Prosecutor's Office already pointed out María Dolores de Cospedal, former general secretary of the party, as another of the alleged ringleaders. However, Judge García-Castellón ruled it out and limited all responsibility to the ministry. “It makes no sense to have encapsulated the facts in the Interior environment and to have rejected the path of judicial investigation towards the origin of the problem,” criticizes Fernández Díaz's lawyer in his defense brief, where he emphasizes: “The false closure of “The investigation, being limited to the Interior environment and ignoring numerous elements and indications in the case that pointed towards other people from entities outside of said ministry, is foreign to all logic.”
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