The court trying the Kitchen case has refused to suspend the trial to investigate the former general secretary of the PP María Dolores de Cospedal, as requested by the popular prosecution exercised by the PSOE. Magistrates Teresa Palacios, Javier Mariano Ballesteros and Francisca Ramis have backed the instructor's decision to dismiss her indictment and have stressed that “if an accusation against a person has been dismissed, the instructor is sovereign.”
In the same vein, the court has ruled out including the Popular Party as a participant for profit or subsidiary civil liable party, another of the requests made by the socialists. The decision coincides with the criterion of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office, whose representative, César de Rivas Verdes, recalled that the competent body to reopen the case would be the investigating court and not the trial court, which “does not have the capacity to revoke that procedural situation.”
The court's decision delimits the scope of the trial, which will focus on the current defendants and on the facts already established in the investigation phase, without opening new lines of investigation in this phase of the process. This leaves out of the immediate judicial debate both Cospedal's role and the possible responsibility of the Popular Party.
The Kitchen case investigates the alleged use of resources from the Ministry of Interior during the Government of Mariano Rajoy to spy on the former PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas and access sensitive documentation for the party. The operation, linked to former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, continues to be one of the key pieces to clarify the so-called state sewers.
