There was no instruction to monitor Luis Bárcenas nor "concern" in the PP about the former treasurer's hard drives. These were the two key ideas defended by former Minister of the Interior Jorge Fernández Díaz and his former 'number two', Francisco Martínez, during the trial of 'Operation Kitchen', which has now reached its eighth week with their appearances as defendants.
Both testified before the National Court (AN) tribunal that is trying the alleged parapolice operation that was supposedly driven by the Ministry of the Interior of Mariano Rajoy's Executive to extract sensitive information about party leaders from Bárcenas and, with it, try to halt the investigation into alleged opaque accounting within the party.
The explanations of the former minister and the former Secretary of State coincided on several aspects of their interrogations. The first, whether they gave the order to follow or spy on the 'popular' former treasurer. "Not at all," replied Fernández Díaz to his lawyer. Francisco Martínez responded in the same vein to his defense: "Never."
The two officials, for whom the Anticorruption Prosecutor's Office is seeking 15 years in prison, also denied having detected "concern" or "unease" in the PP leadership about Bárcenas's hard drives, which allegedly contained documentation related to the party's accounting that, according to investigators, the alleged plot had tried to obtain.
"NO ONE EVER SPOKE TO ME ABOUT 'OPERATION KITCHEN'"
"No one ever conveyed any concern to me about being recorded by Bárcenas, and, of course, the minister never conveyed it to me," stated Martínez. Fernández Díaz also rejected this point in the same words.
The former minister further maintained that he only learned about 'Operation Kitchen' through the press and, therefore, did not discuss the operation with anyone in the years it was allegedly carried out. "I found out about this operation when it started appearing in the media. I had not found out about this operation and, therefore, I had not spoken to anyone. No one ever spoke to me about 'Operation Kitchen'," he assured.
However, their accounts differed regarding the knowledge they might have had in 2013 that Sergio Ríos, the former treasurer's driver, had been recruited as a confidential informant to provide information about Bárcenas's circle.
Fernández Díaz indicated that he did not know that Ríos was collaborating with the National Police until the matter was published in the media, that is, after 2013. Martínez, on the contrary, declared that in the same year the minister asked him "if he knew anything about a collaborator close to the Bárcenas family".
THE MESSAGES THAT FERNÁNDEZ DÍAZ DID NOT ACKNOWLEDGE
On the other hand, Fernández Díaz denied authorship of the messages that, according to investigators, he would have sent in 2013 to Francisco Martínez, inquiring about the Bárcenas family's driver and informing him about the dumping of the former PP treasurer's devices. That operation was carried out by agents of the Central Operational Support Unit (UCAO) of the National Police under the supervision of the then commissioner in charge of the group, Enrique García Castaño, initially indicted but whose case was finally dismissed for health reasons.
The former minister alleged that, not having knowledge of the facts in the period when those messages were supposedly sent, he could "never" have sent a text to Martínez on that matter, emphasizing that it "makes no sense" that he was the one informing his 'number two' and not the other way around.
The message regarding the cloning, reproduced in the oral hearing, was dated October 18, 2013, and read: "The operation was successful. Everything has been dumped (2 iPhones and 1 iPad). Tomorrow we will have the report. According to the informant (we will see if it is so), that material had been given by B to the lawyers to be able to obtain the phones and other data from his agenda through them, in order to contact them to be able to prepare his legal defense".
In the trial, it was stated that the reception of that text would have coincided temporally with the dumping of Bárcenas' devices, although an expert who examined it detected indications of "manipulation" in it.
VILLAREJO, COSPEDAL AND RAJOY'S NAME IN A 'B' FUND REPORT
Both the former minister and his former 'number two' denied having given instructions to other police commanders to pressure Manuel Morocho, inspector of the 'Gürtel case', in order to remove the names of high-ranking PP officials such as former president Rajoy or former general secretary María Dolores de Cospedal, linked to the party's 'B' accounting, from his reports.
These statements were made in the same week that the documentary evidence phase concluded, during which several audio recordings incorporated into the case were heard. In one of them, retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, also a defendant, explained to Cospedal that he had removed "the most important part" of one of those reports. "It even included the president's name," Villarejo stated.
In the recordings, Villarejo claimed to have "tough" conversations between Rajoy and Bárcenas, and discussed with the 'former number two' of the Interior Ministry the existence of alleged payments that the former treasurer would have made to the former president, always according to the account of the leader of 'Gürtel', businessman Francisco Correa.
In other audio recordings, the retired commissioner detailed how he recruited Bárcenas's driver as an informant, whom he nicknamed "the cook," and how he convinced him to provide him with all possible information about the Bárcenas family in exchange for "2,000 bucks a month raw, expenses aside."