Bárcenas and the PP maintained contact through intermediaries after the Gürtel trial

MadridThe PP's slush fund trial highlights the clash between the conservative party and its treasurer until 2009, Luis Bárcenas. However, in recent years the party and Bárcenas have maintained talks with the aim of achieving a win-win agreement that has not materialised. As advanced this Tuesday by El Confidential y El Mundo, PP lawyer Jesús Santos and a close friend of Bárcenas, Agustín de Diego, held more than a dozen meetings when the first Gürtel corruption case was sentenced in 2017. Enrique López, a magistrate of the High Court at that time and now Minister of Interior and Justice of the Government of Isabel Díaz Ayuso in the Community of Madrid, put them in contact and disengaged from it, as sources of his environment quoted by Efe point out.

"Someone from his work environment asked him who was responsible for the case and he told who it was. «If you need something contact him». It seems that this is usual." This is the version given by PP president Pablo Casado in an interview with RAC1 in relation to López's role. Little by little, Bárcenas's interview to El Mundo on Sunday, in which he suggested that he had negotiated with members linked to the current leadership of the PP and that one of them was part of the board of directors, is having its effects. Immediately, the PP denied that any person of the leadership had contact with Bárcenas and threatened to file a complaint against the ex-treasurer. On Sunday, Bárcenas's lawyer, Gustavo Galán, clarified what the newspaper explained.

It has now been revealed that in recent months there has been communication between Santos -representing the PP in the trial on the slush fund - and Bárcenas's friend. As explained by the ex-treasurer in his written statement to the Prosecutor's Office Anticorruption, Bárcenas sought that his wife, Rosalía Iglesias, did not enter prison. He allegedly obtained a promise from the PP that it would be so. Nothing could be further from the truth: Iglesias was sentenced to nearly 13 years in prison and is incarcerated. Bárcenas feels betrayed by the political formation and has decided to let the cat out of the bag, as well as make the trial being held at the High Court a place to set the score with the previous leadership of the PP. So much so that his lawyer announced on Monday during the preliminary questions procedure that he would seek a face-to-face between Spanish ex-president Rajoy and Bárcenas. Santos and Casado have agreed that this move is a way to contribute to the "circus" that, in their view, the trial on the PP's slush fund has become.

Casado in the Kitchen commission

The affairs of the PP with justice have their derivative in Congress one more day with the commission of inquiry into the Kitchen case, in which the PSOE wants Bárcenas to testify as a priority. The deputy spokesman of the socialists in the lower house, Rafael Simancas, has explained that his parliamentary group will propose that the ex-treasurer of the PP be among the first to testify, along with police commissioners, reports Mariona Ferrer i Fornells. The PSOE believes that after that, other politicians would have to appear and, depending on what is said, maybe even Pablo Casado.