Jorge Fernández Díaz's time at the head of the Ministry of the Interior, with the Government of Mariano Rajoy, is under suspicion. Santiago Pedraz, judge of the National Court, has initiated an investigation into the maneuvers plotted in said department against Podemos, which joins other investigations also promoted in this court by the caso Kitchen, the espionage operation devised in 2013 against the former popular treasurer Luis Bárcenas to steal sensitive documentation on senior officials of the PP, who were then surrounded by the judicial summary on the Gürtel plot. However, despite the fact that the party is pointed out as the beneficiary of all these tricks, the party has so far avoided all requests that it be charged as a legal entity.
The PP has just avoided, precisely, the last attempt. Judge Santiago Pedraz – who this week accepted the accusations of the PSOE and Pablo Iglesias, former general secretary of Podemos, in the case about the dirty war against this last political force – has ruled out, however, charging to the popular ones as a legal entity, as the former vice president of the Government had requested. The magistrate argues that, at the moment, he does not have sufficient evidence to act against the main opposition party: “(The investigation cannot be extended to the Popular Party, given the request to receive a statement from him as an investigator, since it is not enough to say that ‘the allegedly criminal activities were intended to entail a correlative benefit for said political formation, with high-ranking institutional officials participating in the events that are the subject of the complaint,' underlines the instructor of the National Court.
The socialists have already tried to put the PP on the bench for the caso Kitchen, which is pending trial. But they were not successful either. The PSOE, also appearing in that summary as a popular accusation, proposed that, in addition to the 11 defendants, an oral trial be opened against the conservative formation as a lucrative participant so that it would respond, among other aspects, for all the money of the reserved funds that were spent on the espionage operation against Bárcenas, concocted from the Interior during the time of Fernández Díaz. “It is not possible to understand, much less explain in isolation, the reasons for the frenetic parapolice activity that is launched in Kitchen without putting it in relation to a much broader operation, launched by the national leadership of the PP to defend itself from the action of justice that was investigating Gürtel and its different territorial ramifications,†argued the political force headed by Pedro Sánchez.
However, when issuing the order to open the oral trial, Judge Manuel García-Castellón rejected that possibility. The Kitchen judge discarded this requirement, considering that it introduced “ex new†. As argued by the instructor of the National Court in his resolution, “until” that “moment,” no claim had been “directed in this regard” against the party and, following the doctrine of the Supreme Court, “it was untimely.” †, taking into account that it was also carried out “without specifying the amount, nor the specific facts and actions from which said responsibility emanates.†.
Subsequently, the former minister himself and his former right-hand man and former Secretary of State for Security, Francisco MartÃnez, joined the PSOE initiative to put the PP on the bench, and pointed out their party as the great beneficiary of the plot. against the former treasurer. This is what Fernández Díaz's defense requested: “From the factual account of the accusation documents, it is clear that the origin and epicenter of the allegedly criminal acts was espionage and the abduction from the Bárcenas family of information supposedly harmful to the interests of the PP, always for its benefit and using reserved funds for such purposes,” read a letter sent to the Criminal Chamber of the National Court, which added: “This being so and requesting a sentence of civil liability, which is accepted and reflected in the opening order itself, it is obvious, coherent and necessary to include the PP as a lucrative participant.
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Faced with the position adopted in these two summaries, the National Court has already condemned the PP three times in the trials on the Gürtel plot, having benefited from the goings-on of the corrupt businessman Francisco Correa, who nested in the heart of the conservative party.
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