Number 13 Génova Street in Madrid has a high symbolic value in the Gürtel case. From his rooms, Mariano Rajoy tried to convince Spain that the plot did not exist. Registered from top to bottom by the National Court, it was put up for sale by the PP of Pablo Casado and recovered by the PP of Alberto Núñez Feijóo. And it was reformed, as the Supreme Court has just recalled, with money from ‘box B’ that the PP has denied for almost two decades. The Gürtel spread its tentacles in some of the great fiefdoms of the Popular Party but with the headquarters of Genoa as the beginning, middle and end of the case.
The PP moved to its current headquarters in 1983 after a few first years between Gran Vía and Plaza de La Luna in Madrid. The electoral victories of José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy were celebrated on its balconies. In their hallways and offices, according to the parallel accounting uncovered by El País, treasurers Álvaro Lapuerta and Luis Bárcenas recorded the inflows and outflows of money regardless of what the party sent, year after year, to the Court of Accounts.
Génova 13 was the setting chosen by Mariano Rajoy to take the stand accompanied by the PP leadership in February 2009. There he denied the existence of the Gürtel plot in the most categorical way possible: “It is not a plot of the PP but against the Popular Party,” he said in a building that they had completely renovated a few years before. This reform, the Supreme Court now says, was paid for with black money from a ‘box B’ that had been operating at full capacity until just a few months before the appearance with “M. Rajoy” among the beneficiaries.
The sentence, known this Friday in full appearance of Carlos Mazón on DANA in the Palau de la Generalitat, irons out the errors of the National Court and reduces the sentences of Luis Bárcenas and those responsible for the company that directed the reform, to the point to open the door so that they do not have to go to prison to serve their sentence. But it confirms point by point everything that has to do with the PP: its treasurer used hundreds of thousands of euros from its ‘box B’ to pay for the reform behind the back of the Treasury, contributing to a tax fraud of another hundreds of thousands of euros. further.
The paradox of the PP fortress is that the symbiotic relationship was forged there that, according to the judges, united the party with the Gürtel plot. Rajoy denied the existence of the Gürtel in the same building where, just five years earlier, Esperanza Aguirre claims to have uncovered the plot in front of Rajoy himself. Where Luis Bárcenas maintained an office and more infrastructure years after the case broke out. “I spent more time in Genoa than in my office,” said Francisco Correa, considered the business brain of the plot.
Judge Pablo Ruz was in charge of the case in the key years of the investigation and was the one who sent the National Police to Génova 13 more than a decade ago to search for the Unifica company contracts that this week resulted in the final sentence. of the case. The requirements that looked like a registry, the familiarity with which the leaders spoke about the offices of the building and the sentences that gave veracity to everything with a condemnation led Pablo Casado to announce the sale of the building.
“We have to stop worrying about our past,” he said in February 2021. A few days before the National Court had begun to hold the trial for the reform of the headquarters and Casado’s objective was to pay debts and, in the process, disassociate of the symbol that united the party with a corrupt plot dismantled more than ten years ago. A year later Casado was politically defenestrated from Génova 13 for pointing out the alleged corruption of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s brother and Alberto Núñez Feijóo entered the seventh floor of the building.
The sale was aborted and the party stayed in its headquarters: “The buildings are not to blame for anything,” he said a few months before the National Court certified, in a decision now confirmed by the Supreme Court, that it was indeed not the fault. It was the building but the treasurer and ultimately the PP, which according to the judges did not exercise “adequate control” over Luis Bárcenas.
Sentences and pending trials
The PP’s headquarters have been the backdrop for decades of corruption that, in practice, allowed the party to finance itself outside the law in some of its large fiefdoms in Madrid such as Majadahonda, Pozuelo or the capital itself. Contracts and public awards in exchange for money for events or commissions for public party positions. The Gürtel plot still has several separate pieces pending trial or final sentence, without the judicially proven existence of its ‘box B’ being a debate for years.
The National Court twice sent the agents to Génova 13 to request papers and documents. In February 2016, the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard went to obtain evidence about possible irregular financing of the Madrid faction of the PP in the electoral campaigns that elevated Esperanza Aguirre. A case derived from the Púnica, not the Gürtel, now at the doors of trial with the focus on Beltrán Gutiérrez, manager of the Madrid PP who also had his office on Génova Street.
The Supreme Court ruling known this week is not the first to confirm the existence of a ‘box B’ managed from Genova 13 and it remains to be seen if it is the last to rely on its existence to declare Gürtel’s corruption proven. Nor is it the first to link its existence to the party and not exclusively to the treasurer.
“An accounting structure parallel to the official one,” said the National Court in the 2018 ruling that precipitated the departure of Mariano Rajoy from La Moncloa. Not a plot against the PP, as Mariano Rajoy said when he was not obliged to tell the truth, but of the PP based in its headquarters. Luis Bárcenas did not rob the PP hand over fist, as the party tried to make public opinion believe when the judicial proceedings took the path of no return, but he used the money from ‘box B’ to reform its headquarters.
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