Rajoy's 4 key videos in the Kitchen case statement: from "each one tells me as they want" to "I wasn't for these things"

BarcelonaMariano Rajoy, former Spanish Prime Minister, declared this Thursday before the National Court for the Kitchen case. Almost a decade after testifying in the Gürtel case, he appeared today and, in an interrogation that lasted 35 minutes, he answered questions about the Popular Party's slush fund, about the operation to spy on and steal information from Luis Bárcenas, and about the use of reserved funds.

We review the four key moments of Rajoy's testimony:

Who was M. Rajoy?

Right at the beginning, the PSOE lawyer asked the former president if he was M. Rajoy, El Asturiano or El Barbas. The answer? "My name is Mariano Rajoy, as everyone knows, and then each person calls me what they want, ask them". This is how his statement began, deflecting and, subsequently, answering with monosyllables or with the phrase "absolutely false", which he repeated on three occasions.

Tense moments between the PSOE lawyer and the magistrate

The interruptions by the court president, Teresa Palacios, to the PSOE lawyer, Gloria dePascual, have been recurrent throughout the entire interrogation. There have also been tense moments: the president reprimanded the lawyer for asking questions that did not belong to the case, to which she protested several times: "Today I will protest everything." Palacios even asked Rajoy to "not answer" some of the questions.

The relationship between Bárcenas and Rajoy

Rajoy has distanced himself from Luis Bárcenas, former treasurer of the PP and victim of the alleged espionage in the Kitchen case. According to the former president of the party and the Spanish government, their relationship was "purely professional" and did not involve "much time." "He was not a person I trusted," he assured. Rajoy insisted that he never "dealt with economic matters" in the PP and that, once Bárcenas left his post, he had no further relationship.

"I was president of the government and I wasn't involved in those things"

Regarding the Kitchen case, the former president has denied having had any interest in Luis Bárcenas's papers, arguing that once he left the position of PP treasurer, he left some boxes with documentation in Génova. "They were there for two months," he stated. According to Rajoy, if they had wanted to destroy or interfere with the documentation, they could have done so because they had these boxes within reach and they paid no attention to them. Regarding María Dolores de Cospedal, who also testified today, Rajoy said that the former general secretary made "some comment" to him about the presence of these boxes, but that he did not give it importance: "I was the president of the government and I was not involved in those matters." He also denied that there was a "political operation" against Bárcenas, saying it was a "police operation" to find out who his front men were, and assured that he did not even know of his existence.