The Prosecutor's Office points out Fernández Díaz as the leader of the Kitchen
The public prosecutor concludes that the operation was not looking for Bárcenas's money, but for documentation that compromised the PP's leadership
BarcelonaThe National Court Prosecutor's Office considers it proven that the former Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz, directly participated in the "criminal parapolice operation" known as the Kitchen case and had "control" over the driver of the former PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas, who acted as an informant. Prosecutor César de Rivas concluded this Tuesday before the court that this illegal operation was not intended to recover Bárcenas's hidden money, but to "boycott" the judicial investigation of the Gürtel case and seize "compromising" documentation from him for the party leadership.
During the presentation of his conclusions report in the trial at the National Court, the prosecutor highlighted the "erratic" and contradictory strategy of the defendants, who tried to "legalize their actions by seeking different objectives for the operation", for example by excusing themselves with the search for bank accounts in Switzerland that the UDEF police had already previously controlled.
For the public prosecutor's office, the objective, from the recruitment of the driver in 2013, was solely to extract sensitive material—such as audio recordings that Bárcenas suggested he had—that implicated PP leaders, specifically PP leader Javier Arenas and the then Spanish president, Mariano Rajoy. This objective, as detailed by de Rivas, was of an exclusively "base" and "criminal" nature, using police and state mechanisms for purely partisan purposes.
The messages
One of the pillars of the prosecution are the text messages attributed to the former minister, which his second-in-command and former Secretary of State for Security, Francisco Martínez, had notarized. The prosecutor highlighted their incriminating nature, "from the moment Sergio Ríos—Bárcenas' driver—was recruited," by both the former minister and his former second-in-command, and recalled a procedural detail: the former minister's own defense avoided asking about these compromising texts during the interrogation at the trial.
The prosecutor's account highlights communications from 2013 where the minister showed awareness of the parapolice network and the actions of the informant driver. In July of that year, he noted personal surveillance: "Driver B Sergio Ríos Esgueva is now performing this function with his wife." A month later, in August, he showed haste to complete the hidden mission: "This information must be obtained." In October, a text explicitly referred to the emptying of the stolen devices, indicating that the informant had transferred to them that "this material had been given by B to the lawyers" to prepare his legal defense.
The Interior Ministry leadership and "number 1"
The prosecutor has also granted evidentiary credibility to the agendas of former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, arguing that in these personal notebooks "he did not deceive himself". The entries reflect the concern of the Deputy Operational Director of the Police, Eugenio Pino, to urgently transmit any "news from the cook" (a police alias used to refer to the undercover driver) and to "tell it to number 1". This last reference, for the Prosecutor's Office, points to former minister Fernández Díaz and not former president Mariano Rajoy. At the same time, the agendas record multiple notes and recordings related to "Chisco", the nickname used to refer to Francisco Martínez.
Thus, the prosecution states that Fernández Díaz and his number two held "the highest hierarchical position within the Ministry of the Interior" to "indirectly" control Bárcenas' driver through "direct controllers" such as commissioners José Manuel Villarejo, Enrique García Castaño, and inspector Andrés Gómez Gordo, known in the force as Cospedín due to having been security advisor to the former general secretary of the PP, María Dolores de Cospedal, in the regional government of La Mancha.
Given the entire scheme, which included surveillance of Bárcenas' wife, entry into a premises, or the dumping of devices, the prosecutor requests 15 years in prison for Fernández Díaz, for Martínez, for former DAO Pino, and for Gómez Gordo. Likewise, he requests 19 years for the main operational executor, Villarejo, and 12 and a half years for the informant driver, Sergio Ríos. Finally, he claims two and a half years in prison for the former head of Internal Affairs, policeman Marcelino Martín Blas.