Cospedal's audio recording implicating Rajoy in the Kitchen: "The president told me."

BarcelonaDespite the PP's efforts to deny its existence, the maneuvers of the state's sewers during Mariano Rajoy's governments are accumulating ever more evidence. New audio published this Wednesday by RAC1In fact, it directly implicates the former Spanish president in the Kitchen operation, the operation paid for with secret funds to steal information about the party's corruption from former PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas. It concerns a September 2014 conversation between María Dolores de Cospedal and José Manuel Villarejo. "I know that they had previously found, and more or less cleaned out, everything he had," the former PP secretary general says at one point, supposedly about Bárcenas. She adds: "The president told me, no one else did."

This is not the only reference to the former Spanish president that Cospedal made during the meeting with the former commissioner, which reportedly took place at the PP headquarters on Génova Street. At another point, the PP leader explains that "Rajoy left the other one [referring to Bárcenas, who was then in pretrial detention] to maintain the lines of communication." "Just in case," she argues. And she continues: "To have different paths, because since I'm supposed to be inflexible, they trust me just enough. Above all for one reason, because since I don't have any corpses, I can decide to set it in motion all over the place. And then I leave them all in shit," she concludes.

Cospedal, who in the audio recordings also talks about the role of the driver of the former treasurer of the PP –whom Kitchen would have used as a confidant–, passed by on Monday the commission of inquiry into Operation Catalonia of Congress and described as an invention both the patriotic police like the dirty war against political adversaries. It's the same thing that Alicia Sánchez-Camacho did shortly after and that they had already done weeks before. both Rajoy and former Interior Minister Jorge Fernández DíazThe Popular Party's strategy is based on denying the truth and questioning the authenticity of the audio recordings that incriminate them.

But this isn't the first time Rajoy has been singled out for his role in the Kitchen. Villarejo himself did so in court, where he confirmed that messages are exchanged about the plot, and in Congress concluded in 2021 that the former Spanish president and Cospedal were the ones directing the operation. The new audio recordings add arguments to this theory, but neither one nor the other has been prosecuted in the case. The top leader of the PP under investigation, and for whom the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office is requesting 15 years in prison, is Fernandez Diaz.