The PSOE insists on putting the PP on the bench as a beneficiary of Operation Kitchen

The PSOE, represented as a popular accusation in the Kitchen case, returns to the fray to try to put the PP on the bench as a legal entity for the operation concocted in 2013 within the Ministry of the Interior and the National Police to spy on the former popular treasurer Luis Bárcenas with the supposed objective of stealing documentation that could harm his party. The socialists have presented a brief to the National Court to declare null and void the resolution that rejected this possibility. The PSOE wants the PP to be responsible on a lucrative basis for the money from the reserved funds used for this irregular operation, as well as for the expenditure derived from the public means (human and technical) that were used.

With this new writing, the PSOE tries for the third time to put the PP on the bench. The investigating judge Manuel García-Castellón and the Criminal Chamber have already rejected it – the latter, on March 8 -. The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office has also opposed it. However, the socialists consider that, with this position, their rights as a popular accusation are “restricted” and “undermined,” and the right to try to recover the public funds used is violated.

After the Criminal Chamber rejected on March 8 its attempt to prosecute the PP as a legal entity, the PSOE has changed its strategy and has requested that the order that discarded its claim be declared null and void. According to the party's arguments, among other aspects, their right to effective judicial protection has been violated, due to “infringement of the right to obtain a reasonable response with the prohibition of all arbitrariness by public powers”; and his right to “equality of arms” in the case.

The PSOE's battle to try to put the PP on the bench has been going on for a year and a half. In their indictment, presented in the fall of 2022, the socialists already put this possibility on the table for the first time, considering the conservative party as a lucrative participant in the plot. The popular ones were the beneficiaries of the alleged corrupt network hatched in the Interior, according to the party: “It is not possible to understand, much less explain in isolation, the reasons for the frenetic parapolice activity that is launched in Kitchen without putting it in relation to a “Much broader operation launched by the national leadership of the PP to defend itself from the judicial action that Gürtel was investigating and its different territorial ramifications.”

The operation against the former treasurer was activated after publications the Bárcenas papers about box b of the PP and the corruption around Francisco Correa's companies. For this reason, Judge García-Castellón has sent 11 people to the bench: among them, Jorge Fernández Díaz, Minister of the Interior with Mariano Rajoy; Francisco Martínez, former Secretary of State for Security; and Eugenio Pino, former deputy operational director of the National Police.

However, in October 2023, when opening an oral trial against the former leadership of the Interior and the Police, the judge rejected the request to also seat the PP on the bench. The magistrate considered that it was introduced “ex novo”. As he argued in his resolution, “until” that “moment”, no claim had been “directed in this sense” against the party and, following the doctrine of the Supreme Court, “it was untimely”, taking into account that it was also carried out “without specify the amount, nor the specific facts and actions from which said responsibility emanates.”

The PSOE then appealed that decision. But the Criminal Chamber also rejected it on March 8, although it alleged reasons different from those of the judge. According to this court, the socialists are not “legitimized” to claim that “civil liability” from the PP: “It only corresponds to the prosecutor's office or to those harmed by the crime committed, not to the popular accusation, whose intervention in the process is necessarily limited to the criminal sphere”.

The socialists do not share this interpretation, and consider that the Chamber's decision means “forbidding the power” of the popular accusation “to demand compensation for diverted public funds, which have been deducted from the public services of all citizens.” . “A constitutional reading of the criminal process is being carried out that is harmful to the fundamental right to effective judicial protection,” adds the document presented by the PSOE, dated March 29 and to which EL PAÍS had access.

The socialists' document – ​​technically called “incident of nullity” – emphasizes: “The doctrine of the Supreme Court has not been immutable in relation to the scope and limits of popular accusations. It is well known that the criteria followed until the precedent renamed as the Botín doctrine was amended, or complemented if you will, with the successive interpretation elaborated in the Atutxa doctrine and then with the Nóos case. Based on the aforementioned, legitimation is recognized for the popular accusation to exercise criminal action, regardless of the acquittal position of the prosecutor's office and the rest of the accusations made. Of course, as long as the object of the prosecution are facts that affect crimes with legal assets known as multi-offensive, diffuse or supra individual.

The PSOE, which also accuses the Chamber of making a simple “copy/paste” [copia/pega] of Supreme Court resolutions without going into the substance of the matter, emphasizes that the civil claim for the funds used in Kitchen has a direct connection with the exercise of the criminal action: “The popular prosecution person has a legitimate interest in compensation, since the “Funds diverted in a parapolice operation could well have been taken from the fight against terrorism or drug trafficking, or from public services.” What's more, the socialists add that the State Prosecutor's Office and the State Attorney's Office have claimed subsidiary civil liability of the State: “In this way, the State can be held accountable for the damage generated not by its malfunction, but by criminal activity.” of certain members without the main beneficiary, the Popular Party, being responsible for the public funds that were illicitly diverted in order to obstruct an active judicial investigation into the political corruption that affected the main leaders of the monolithic formation of the executive. .

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