Bárcenas confesses: "Rajoy destroyed the paper trail of the slush fund not knowing that I kept a copy".

MadridWith his wife, Rosalía Iglesias, in prison after being sentenced for her implication in the Gürtel plot, the ex-treasurer of the PP, Luis Bárcenas, has decided to let the cat out of the bag and expose party heavyweights in court. Just five days before the start of the trial at the National Court for the PP's slush fund (next Monday), Bárcenas has confessed and has broken the truce he maintained with former Spanish President Mariano Rajoy. In a letter sent to the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, confirms the intention to collaborate with the prosecution in all present and future investigations, including the Kitchen plot, which also affects the former PP leader. According to the text, advanced by El País and El Mundo and to which ARA has had access, the ex treasurer claims that Rajoy was a "perfectly aware" of the opaque accounting in his party to collect cash envelopes, and accuses him of having destroyed a part of the so-called "Bárcenas papers" in early 2009 at a meeting the two held at party headquarters.

For the first time, Bárcenas has confessed to feeling deceived by the promises that the PP made about his wife. Specifically, that she would never enter prison. He admits that it was this commitment that led him "to sign the truce" with the PP "withdrawing the complaint that [he] had filed for the destruction of the information contained" on his personal computers.

We collect below a few literal passages of the confession of Bárcenas, which would aim to achieve certain prison benefits for Rosalía Iglesias, sentenced to nearly 13 years in prison. But in practice it is an information bomb for the former leadership of the PP and also for the current leadership of Pablo Casado, at a time when the former Spanish president and the former secretary general of the PP, María Dolores de Cospedal, have to appear soon in Congress in connection with the Kitchen case.

1. Rajoy's involvement

He was "perfectly aware" of the whole plot

"Mariano Rajoy was perfectly aware of all these actions, to the point that in early 2009 we had a meeting in his office in which I showed him the slush fund accounting and he exclaimed: 'How could you continue to keep all that compromising documentation!" He ended up destroying it, personally, in the paper shredding machine without knowing that I kept a copy, much of which was stolen from my wife's studio when they broke in".

2. Who received cash envelopes?

Rajoy, Cospedal, Trillo and Rato, among others

"The people who received the salary supplements were, specifically: Mariano Rajoy, Dolores de Cospedal, Federico Trillo, Pío García Escudero, Francisco Álvarez Cascos, Ángel Acebes, Javier Arenas, Rodrigo Rato and Jaime Ignacio Burgo. The deliveries were made personally by Don Álvaro [Lapuerta] -and sometimes by me-, with my knowledge. He instructed me to take cash out of the safe in my office with a frequency that depended on the liquidity of the box, and I introduced the money in an envelope where I wrote the name [of the person who was to receive it]".

3. How far back does the crime go?

Since 1982 there was a system of illegal financing

"Since 1982 there was, in an institutionalised way, a system of financing of the PP with slush fund payments that were made through donations".

4. How much money is involved?

Bárcenas speaks of a million euros

"In 2008 there was an income recorded in this parallel accounting of €1m. About €900,000 was used, taken out of the slush fund, to remodel the PP headquarters on Calle Génova, 13".

5. Where did the money come from?

Donations in exchange for public awards

"The slush funds generally came from donations or contributions made by people related to companies that benefited from important public awards. These donations were made with cash payments made directly to Álvaro Lapuerta, and I was present in some of them [...]. It is true that the vast majority of the donations did not have a finalist nature - in the sense of a percentage for the adjudication of the work or public service adjudicated - but there may be some specific cases in which there was this motivation".

6. What did they do with the money?

Apart from paying the works of the headquarters on Calle Génova, they bought shares of the newspaper 'Libertad Digital'

"As for the subscription of shares of Libertad Digital in the hands of Álvaro Lapuerta, for an approximate amount of €140,000 at the end of 2004, this subscription was made with funds from the sluch fund. He asked me to provide him with the money from the safe in my office [...]. It was a medium that was close to the ideas of the PP and above all to the thesis of ETA's authorship behind the 11-M attacks that took place a few months before the subscription of the shares".