The former “number two” of the PP and the commissioner spoke about the payments with funds reserved for the ex-partner of Jordi Pujol Ferrusola and the infiltration in the Mossos d’Esquadra in a conversation a few days before the 1-O which is in the power of the National Court
The National Court buries a police report which points the finger at the Cospedal affair in the Kitchen for two years
Analysis – The sewers of the PP: all crimes everywhere except in the García Castellón court
The court’s inaction in the Villarejo case in the face of evidence presented by the police two years ago regarding the involvement of María Dolores de Cospedal in the Kitchen case affects another fundamental episode of the dirty war of Mariano Rajoy’s time, Operation Catalonia. In one of the three audios ignored by judges Manuel García Castellón and Antonio Piña, the secretary general of the PP appears sharing the police maneuvers against the separatists in 2017 with commissioner José Manuel Villarejo.
It is September 12, 2017 and there are just over two weeks until the independence referendum. The recording, lasting one hour and two minutes, begins in the street, when Cospedal’s chief of staff goes to meet Villarejo to introduce him discreetly, through the garage, to the PP headquarters. They already know each other. They talk about vacations. José Luis Ortiz, the name of Cospedal’s collaborator, was charged in the Kitchen case. And like his boss, he was exonerated by Judge García Castellón.
Villarejo goes to Cospedal because he begins to be harassed by the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office and the capital prevention service of the Bank of Spain (Sepblac), dependent on the Ministry of Economy. His involvement in the “little Nicolás” affair, in the harassment of Dr. Pinto, as well as his bank accounts and his businesses in tax havens, have been known for a long time. He asks Cospedal for help and she tells him not to worry. “I’m going to talk to Guindos and I’m going to talk to the public prosecutor’s office,” promises the man who was then “number two” of the PP, to whom six weeks later he will be arrested, accused of leading a criminal organization.
Given the proximity of the 1-O referendum, the conversation is filled with fragments about Catalonia. “If they detect that Vicky is collecting money from the police, we have a problem, don’t you think?” Villarejo said at one point in the conversation. “Well yes,” Cospedal replies. “La Vicky” is Victoria Álvarez, former companion of Jordi Pujol Ferrusola, son of the politician and tried alongside him these days before the National Court for the corruption case that bears the family name.
Victoria Álvarez and the convicted businessman Javier de la Rosa constitute the origin of the case, promoted in the midst of the fight against secessionism. Both received earmarked funds, as was proven. Commissioner Villarejo intervened in the confessions that gave rise to the case. Lawyer Rafael Redondo, a police collaborator and tried and convicted alongside her, picked up Álvarez at the Atocha police station in Madrid, took her to the UDEF headquarters and witnessed the testimony that gave birth to the Pujol case.
All this happened in early 2013. The conversation on the ground floor of Génova dates from September 2017 and, as Villarejo and Cospedal agree, Victoria Álvarez continues to receive payments “from the police”. At the start of the trial, several defenses requested the annulment of the proceedings due to the illegal obtaining of evidence by the “political brigade”. The preceding questions will be resolved in a decision.
In all these years, Operation Catalonia has not found a court to investigate. Its existence, revealed by elDiario.es in November 2014, extended to different cases, but the court that had the most information about it never wanted to know anything. Magistrate Manuel García Castellón, investigator of the Villarejo case for years, and the anti-corruption prosecution itself considered that the police officer’s work in Catalonia was an investigation into corruption and classified some of his findings as secret.
Only Commissioner Eugenio Pino, architect of the political brigade under the orders of the PP, was convicted by the Madrid court for attempting to introduce information of illicit origin into the Pujol affair, a maneuver aborted by the investigating judge at the time, José de la Mata. Even the publication of an audio from Villarejo in which the Minister of the Interior at the time, Jorge Fernández Díaz, admitted to having knowledge of police maneuvers against sovereignty did not merit investigation. In this recording, revealed by El País in 2022, Fernández Díaz assured: “I will deny under torture that this meeting ever existed”.
This is one of the recordings that appear in room 32, which the popular accusation of the PSOE has just denounced was used by García Castellón as “a safe” in which to deposit everything he did not want to investigate. This piece included the recordings of Villarejo revealed by various media, the Telegram channel of the ultra Alvise Pérez and the audios provided by the businessman Javier Pérez Dolset. In 2023, Internal Affairs gave the judge a letter with three audios about his relationship with Kitchen, the spying on Bárcenas which has already been investigated in another article. But the rest of the crimes hidden in these recordings remain unpunished.
As elDiario.es learned, in these recordings there are allusions to the establishment of Jordi Pujol’s accounts in Switzerland which were never published, to the case of the false story of Xavier Trias, to the conversations with De la Rosa to set up the Pujol case and to other maneuvers against Artur Mas.
A shadow interior minister
In the meeting between Villarejo and Cospedal that this media reproduces today, the knowledge of the “number two” of the PP and Minister of Defense at the time of the police maneuvers against the independence process is evident. Among them, the existence of police informants among the Mossos d’Esquadra, also paid with reserved funds.
And likewise, the power that Cospedal exercises over the Ministry of the Interior. The general secretary of the PP boasts of having dismissed “the DAO”, that is to say the deputy operational directors of the police and the civil guard who came from the era of Fernández Díaz. “What it cost me to go to the DAO…” says Cospedal, then warns that it is a secret that she is interfering in the politics of the Ministry of the Interior. “Well, it didn’t cost me because I didn’t tell you,” he warns the policeman.
Villarejo alerts him to the indolence and incapacity of the new Minister of the Interior, Juan Ignacio Zoido, and of the person he chose to be police director, Germán López. The commissioner made a mistake in making this comment. Zoido was Cospedal’s ally in the two factions that competed for power within the Andalusian PP, against Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, who supported Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, the great enemy of the secretary general. Villarejo warns him that Zoido is called “El Zampa” in the police and that the director of the Corps is known as “El Zampa 2”. Cospedal corrects him: “I don’t think the minister does it. »
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