“It’s Villarejo, stupid!”. This brief reminder and the already existing indications in the ‘Kitchen case’ should call Judge Manuel García-Castellón to caution. But no. In an operation here I catch you, here I kill you, the order to close the investigation was issued on July 29, 2021.
We already know: it is an ideal date when one has already made the decision to shelve a procedure that has pierced your head with worries for five years because of the ‘Tandem case’, of which Kitchen is one of the 30 pieces . He also had to call the prudence of the third section of the Criminal Court of the National Court. But no. On April 20, the third section dismissed the appeal of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor, and of all the 12 appeals, in which it was requested to extend the investigation to delve into the evidence that affected the “political” part of the case: that is, the then general secretary, María Dolores de Cospedal, and her husband, Ignacio López del Hierro.
But García-Castellón was primarily interested in annulling the accusation of both and if that meant closing the proceedings, then so much the worse for them. The prosecutors only asked for an extension of the investigation and complained that Judge García-Castellón resisted crossing a border in his inquiries: the PP. “But what it seems is that this step is not wanted to be taken. There is a resounding negative in that direction. As if a cordon or unacceptable red line had been established that could not be crossed in the investigation,” they maintained their appeal.
The main argument used by the third criminal section to support García-Castellón, a magistrate who is usually criticized for his way of instructing the cases of his central court of instruction number 6 of the National Court, was the following: the evidence against Cospedal and López del Hierro “are not an unequivocal sign of participation [de ambos] in the facts under investigation“. According to the magistrates, the relations between the Cospedal-Villarejo-Del Hierro trio in regard to the exchange of data on different issues of corruption of the Popular Party dated back to 2009, when the ‘Gürtel case’ broke out.
If the annotations and audios incorporated in the case reflected a stage long before the assembly of the ‘Operation Kitchen’ 2013-2016, precisely Cospedal’s interest in Villarejo’s information -the one he had and the one he should obtain- would lead to Kitchen. And those were the traces that prosecutors wanted to follow from the 2009 contacts. Well, that’s what the “new audios” provide now.
We heard Cospedal desperately looking for the “little book” of PP bonuses and in his conversations with Villarejo asks you to do your best to abort your post. operation that will later continue with the conversion of the National Police into a branch of the PP aimed at find more compromising papers in the hands of former national treasurer Luis Bárcenas that could bring down the government of Mariano Rajoy after his first year of life, when the Swiss authorities informed Judge Pablo Ruz, in December 2012, that the former treasurer had accumulated a fortune of 48.2 million euros in various Swiss banks.
And these new recordings? Where were you? Why did the parties to the case not have the material? Tax sources tell this newspaper that it is very likely that the material could be in the summary, but not decrypted. And that for this reason could never be taken into account. But, in any case, it is up to Judge García-Castellón to initiate proceedings to clarify things. The first thing he has done on similar occasions is to ask for the material published by the media. And then specify whether it actually reflects the material seized at the time from Villarejo at his home.
García-Castellón, therefore, is in a position to order ex officio the reopening of the investigation proceedings of the ‘Kitchen case’, given that the dismissals of María Dolores de Cospedal and Ignacio López del Hierro are provisional, precisely because this allows the decision to be taken to reopen the case if necessary. If this course does not take place, the accusations and defenses could, after going through the judge, request the intervention of the third section of Criminal Matters to achieve reopening after going through the judge.
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Who can be filtering the audios? The roads of Villarejo are inscrutable. But keep in mind that his mentality works with symbolic dates. And one of them is the proximity of the end of the oral trial of the three pieces of the Tandem case -those of ‘Pintor’, ‘Iron’ and ‘Man’- for which 109 years in prison is played and the use of his last word, to which the former commissioner grants -as happens daily in Spain- a “historical importance”.
More prosaically: the thunder of punishment.