Since October 2023, the National Court has been in possession of a police report which includes the recordings of three conversations between Commissioner Villarejo and María Dolores de Cospedal in which the involvement of the Secretary General of the PP in the maneuvers aimed at sabotaging the judicial investigation of Box B of the party is revealed. Neither the previous judge of the macro-case against Villarejo, Manuel García Castellón, nor the current one, Antonio Piña, took any action based on the aforementioned police report, knowledge of which was stolen these two years from the parties appearing in the separate piece Kitchen.
This is the official letter UAI (Internal Affairs Unit) 3334/23 of October 27, 2023. On page six, the lead inspector in charge of the investigation informs the court of the audios that accompany his writing. “The publication consists of 18 files, and it includes all audio files previously uploaded to the WeTransfer platform, others listed below, of which the so-called MDCospedal is attached as Annex 01, for a proper assessment of their possible connection with the facts being investigated (Exhibit 7) by its authority.” This assessment requested by the police was never carried out.
Number 7 is identified with the separate exhibit from the Villarejo case known as the Kitchen. He is investigating the police sabotage of the judicial investigation into box B of the PP with reserved funds, maneuvers that occurred during the first mandate of Mariano Rajoy. The piece will be judged next spring. A group of police officers will sit on the bench alongside the then Secretary of State for Security, Francisco Martínez, and the former Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz. For the two politicians, the anti-corruption prosecution requires 15 years in prison.
The person who was briefly indicted and escaped investigation and court was María Dolores de Cospedal. In July 2021, Judge García Castellón filed a complaint against her, contrary to the criteria of the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office. This decision also meant stopping the evidence that pointed to Mariano Rajoy, who was never investigated. The following year, when El País revealed new recordings incriminating the former PP secretary general, the judge refused to reopen the case against her, because these published recordings were not part of the case. It is now known that the police incorporated the audios after the procedure and that Judge García Castellón did not investigate them either.
One of these audios was published by El País. In the recording, the number two of the PP speaks with the commissioner on January 13, 2013: “The little booklet would be better if he could stop it. » Cospedal refers to the so-called “Bárcenas papers”, the handwritten proof that the PP managed for at least twenty years a B fund filled with black money coming from businessmen, as several court decisions have already proven, and which had not yet been revealed.
After more than two years in a drawer, on November 13, the parties finally had access to the Internal Affairs office. The lawyers were forced to read it in court itself and were not informed of it, although the proceedings were not secret. Once he was able to consult the report, the representation of the PSOE, which acts as a popular accusation, requested the statement of the main inspector who signed the letter.
The police officer’s statement finally took place on November 25. During it, lead inspector Gonzalo Fraga explained how the Interior had incorporated the three files into its report “in case they could be linked and so that a judicial and fiscal authority could evaluate them”. “These audio files were heard by my team and have been included in the annex in their entirety. I am not aware that there is a transcription of them in the proceedings,” said the police commander.
The current judge to the policeman: “The room is closed!”
The lead inspector reported that there were three audios of Cospedal with Villarejo, one lasting an hour and dated 2017, and two from 2013. He said that the political leader and the police officer talk about various topics and among them some that could “refer to the facts” of Exhibit 7 or the Kitchen case. Before he could elaborate further, the current head of Court of Instruction number 6, Antonio Piña, abruptly interrupted him. “No, part number 7 is not valued, sent and closed!” exclaimed the judge, according to a document presented by the PSOE representation.
The socialists have just formally requested that Cospedal, López del Hierro and the Popular Party, as a legal entity, be indicted in the Kitchen affair. “All the incriminating evidence that the police have placed on the table of their honors and the anti-corruption prosecution regarding the participation of Ms. Cospedal in this criminal conspiracy has been and is ignored deliberately and without any motivation. This is not a conspiracy theory, nor an opinion, it is unfortunately a fact,” reads the PSOE letter.
In September 2022, at the same time as he refused to reopen the investigation against Cospedal, García Castellón ordered the opening of a new piece of the Villarejo case, number 34, where the accumulation of recordings published by the media, a Telegram channel of the ultra Alvise Pérez and those provided to the court itself by the businessman Javier Pérez Dolset, all made by the commissioner and whose content has never been investigated.
The judge’s only intention was to verify whether all these audios were part of the documents intercepted in Villarejo – of which only about 50% were decrypted – or whether they were recordings that were not part of the case, as García Castellón himself explained in his order.
García Castellón’s maneuver
But piece number 34 was never heard again. None of the appearing parties had access to these recordings. However, the PSOE brief indicates that number 34 “was not a procedural document but a safe in which to deposit what should not see the light of day”. The socialists speak in their writings of “a procedural ruse to avoid the reopening of the separate room 7 Kitchen or the opening of a new room to investigate these events with clear appearances of criminal relevance”.
On April 18, 2024, García Castellón lifted the secrecy of Exhibit 34, but the official document UAI 3334/23, where the police attached the three audios on Cospedal, “was excluded from the index of the file” and was not uploaded to the digital platform to which the parties have personal access, according to the PSOE complaint. Only a procedure requested by the socialists to extend the investigation and which did not expire allowed the police to emerge last November.
The Criminal Chamber of the National Court ruled in favor of García Castellón in his refusal to reopen the Kitchen file, but left the door open to the revelations that could arise in the context of Exhibit 34. However, the audios were put away without their content being evaluated. “These expectations of the third section of the Criminal Chamber, shared by the accusations, were disappointed by the inaction and concealment carried out both by the investigating court and by the anti-corruption prosecution itself,” affirms the PSOE in its writing.
The anti-corruption attorney general, Alejandro Luzón, had refused to allow his subordinates to appeal García Castellón’s refusal to reopen the case, but the Criminal Court had to rule on the request of the popular prosecutor’s office. The current judge in charge of the case, Antonio Piña, was warned against “inaction and concealment” in eight briefs presented by the prosecution brought by the PSOE. “He did nothing, except to declare several times in the declaration (from the Interior police) that separate room 7 was closed, but without evaluating possible new facts of which he seemed to be unaware,” add the socialists.
Three conversations between Cospedal and Villarejo
January 20, 2013. The broader context of this conversation must be sought years ago, in July 2009, when the first meeting between the active police command and the number two of the PP took place. Villarejo went to Génova to meet Cospedal and her then-husband, Ignacio López del Hierro. Both entrust him with “specific jobs” and promise him remuneration. At that time, they did not know that the problems arising from the Gürtel affair and the “provisional indictment” of Luis Bárcenas would eventually explode with the imprisonment of the party treasurer.
El Mundo published on January 18, 2013 that “Bárcenas paid black bonuses for years to part of the PP leadership.” A rumor circulates according to which the party’s B box is collected in “a small notebook”. Two days later, in the first recording on which the National Court did not investigate, the number two of the PP calls from a landline the police officer assigned to the Operational Directorate of the Police and tells him that she wants these notes and that they must “stop” them. He didn’t understand. A few days later, on January 31, El País published Bárcenas’ newspapers and broke the most serious corruption scandal in the history of the PP.
April 26, 2013. Once again, Cospedal avoids cell phones. This is not a coincidence. She herself explains to Villarejo that she did not call before because “she did not have a landline within reach”. During the conversation, she explains that the Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz, gave her a UDEF report before the judge of the case in box B. “He called me last night to tell me that I would have one day left before the judge saw it,” Cospedal told the police officer.
The commissioner informs Cospedal of his movements to interrupt the progress of the case B file. The president of the government and the party, Mariano Rajoy, cannot be among those affected by the scandal. Villarejo claims to have been with the chief inspector in charge of investigations, Manuel Morocho, and with his boss, commissioner José Luis Olivera, pursued in Kitchen and author of the cocaine plot against Miguel Urbán. “I was having a drink and José Luis was eating the pot because the president’s name was in the report… I don’t know if you know that,” Villarejo explains. To which Cospedal replies that he didn’t know.
Indeed, three days later, Morocho submitted report 39199/13. Rajoy only appears in passing: “Mariano Rajoy 2nd quarter” and “Trajs. Mariano. Bárcenas’ notes on the president are not expanded on in the police report. Morocho publicly denounced the pressure he suffered during his investigation into the Gürtel and PP affairs. He did it in the courts and in the Congress of Deputies. “They tried to break us,” he told the National Court.
September 12, 2017. Four years after the order to destroy Box B, Villarejo continues to maintain relations with Cospedal and her husband. The current context is that of the independence challenge in Catalonia, but Villarejo is also concerned about his situation. His involvement has already been reported in several cases. Cospedal’s husband, for whom the PSOE is once again demanding charges, comes to pick him up and takes him to Cospedal, who is now, in addition to being the party’s number two, also Minister of Defense. “I talk to who I need to talk to,” Cospedal tells Villarejo for his peace of mind.
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