The trial for ‘Operation Kitchen’ has entered one of its most relevant phases with the statements as defendants of former Minister of the Interior Jorge Fernández Díaz and his former Secretary of State for Security, Francisco Martínez. Both emphatically denied having ordered the spying on former PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas or having participated in a parapolice operation to steal sensitive information related to the party's alleged slush fund.
During their interrogations before the Audiencia Nacional, both Fernández Díaz and Martínez rejected any involvement in the alleged plot organized from the Ministry of the Interior during the Government of Mariano Rajoy. Both agreed that they never received instructions nor conveyed orders to monitor the former popular treasurer.
The defenses focused a good part of their questions on dismantling the thesis of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, which requests 15 years in prison for both. The defendants insisted that they never perceived concern within the PP about the content of Bárcenas' hard drives or about possible compromising recordings about party leaders.
“Nobody ever spoke to me about Operation Kitchen”, assured Fernández Díaz, who maintained that he learned about the case only through the media years after the investigated events. Francisco Martínez maintained a similar line and stated that he never received instructions from the minister related to spying on the former treasurer.
However, contradictions did appear between them regarding their knowledge of Sergio Ríos, Bárcenas' driver, who was allegedly converted into a police informant. While the former minister denied knowing anything about this collaboration until it became public, Martínez stated that Fernández Díaz asked him in 2013 about a close collaborator of the Bárcenas family.
Another key point of the trial was the messages attributed to the former minister about the alleged dumping of Bárcenas' phones and electronic devices. Fernández Díaz denied recognizing those messages and defended that “it makes no sense” for him to be the one informing his Secretary of State about police operations of that type. Furthermore, he recalled that one of the expert reports detected signs of manipulation in part of the analyzed messages.
The oral hearing was also marked by the reproduction of audios of former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, in which he spoke with María Dolores de Cospedal about reports related to the PP's B fund and even mentioned the name of Mariano Rajoy. In other recordings, Villarejo detailed how he recruited Bárcenas' driver as an informant in exchange for money to obtain data about the former treasurer's family environment.
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