New judicial blow to the leadership of the Ministry of the Interior during the governments of Mariano Rajoy. The judge of the National Court Manuel García Castellón has summoned the former Secretary of State for Security, Francisco Martínez, and Commissioner Eugenio Pino, former Deputy Operational Director (DAO) of the National Police, to testify as under investigation for their alleged involvement in the alleged pressure exerted on one of Luis Bárcenas' first lawyers in the Gürtel caseJavier Gómez de Liaño, to prevent the former PP treasurer from spreading more information about the party's corruption.
The summons of both as defendants, requested by Gómez de Liaño himself, who is prosecuting the case and who has had the support of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, occurs after two reports from the National Police incorporated into the case detailed the existence of at least nine entries in the handwritten diaries of retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo that indicate that both of them allegedly knew about these maneuvers. The investigations into these pressures, which form part 36 of the macrosummary of the Tandem case in which the parapolice plot around Villarejo is investigated, had been archived by the judge, but the National Court ordered him to reopen it in February of last year.
In his judicial resolution, García Castellón details that, so far, no witness or investigator in the case has pointed out in his statement directly to Martínez or Pino for the alleged pressure on the lawyer, but he adds that several notes in Villarejo's agendas point to who were supposedly informed about them for about a year. In these notes, the retired commissioner recorded his efforts to gather information about an alleged irregular payment of more than 5 million euros that Gómez de Liaño would have received from the leader of the Russian mafia Zakhar Kalashov, for whom he was also a defense attorney. All of this, with the alleged objective of putting pressure on him to prevent Bárcenas – whose defense he assumed in July 2013, almost half a year after the publication of the Bárcenas papers– continued pulling the blanket.
In the case of the former number two of the Interior, the order highlights that there are eight notes dated between October 7, 2013 and August 21 of the following year in which reference is made to alleged meetings between Villarejo and Chisco, the nickname with which the retired commissioner referred to Francisco Martínez. In them, the police officer detailed that in said meetings he had tried to “microphone G. Liaño. Operation Kalasov”, “Sergi says that Liaño receives money in Switzerland” or “he proposes making arrangements to see if Liaño traveled to Uruguay these days”. In the case of Pino, who appears in Villarejo's handwritten diaries as Pinthere is a note from April 24, 2014 with a succession of names and initials, among them “LB” [Luis Bárcenas] and “Liano”.
For all this, the judge concludes that the appearances of the former number two of the Interior and the former Chief of the Police are “useful and pertinent” and it is agreed that they do so as investigated for the possible “incriminating content that both statements could presumably have.” In this sense, García Castellón recalls that Martínez and Pino are being prosecuted in another piece of the same summary, that of the so-called Kitchen case, in which the illegal espionage of Bárcenas by the alleged parapolice plot to snatch compromising documents for PP leaders for the collection of bonuses is investigated. Former Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz, a trusted man of former President Rajoy, is also being prosecuted for this plot; Villarejo himself and several commissioners and agents of the National Police.
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In fact, the piece about the espionage of the former treasurer and the one referring to the alleged pressure on Gómez de Liaño – a former judge expelled from the race in 1999 for prevarication in the Sogecable case― are connected. However, the National Court decided to create a specific piece on the latter since when its investigation began – after sending a court in Marbella several audio files found in the search of the home of a person linked to Kalashov – the instruction of the Kitchen case It was practically finished.
In this last order, the judge has refused to call to testify the former Director General of the Police in the period 2012-2016, Ignacio Cosidó, and the State lawyer on leave Alejandro Auset, whom Gómez de Liaño also related to the alleged pressures he suffered. The magistrate considers that “none of the statements made throughout the investigation and none of the documents provided to the procedure have highlighted any type of connection or relationship” of both with the alleged pressure on Bárcenas' lawyer. He sewn, that during the instruction of the Kitchen case He was not called to testify either as a defendant or as a witness, provided that he has hidden behind the fact that, among the functions of his position, it was not to direct police investigations and that, therefore, he never knew of the existence of the operation allegedly plotted in the Interior to spy on his party's former treasurer.
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