Between 2013 and 2015, against Luis Bárcenas, Commissioner Manuel Vázquez was the head of the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit (UDEF) of the National Police, to which the group of agents who investigated the crime belonged. Gürtel case and the former popular treasurer. More than a decade later, now retired, the former police commander sat down this Tuesday before the court of the National Court to say that he never knew anything about that parallel surveillance operation on Bárcenas and his family, despite the fact that it was the UDEF that followed the accountant’s steps by order of the judge.
This testimony from Commissioner Vázquez reinforces the thesis of the accusations, which maintain that the Kitchen operation, concocted by the Gürtel case from a court of the National Court. In fact, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has launched itself into that line as soon as its interrogation has started.
—Did you request any type of support from the National Police to cover any aspect of the Gürtel case? —asked the representative of the public ministry, César de Rivas.
-No. From the UDEF, no.
—Did you realize from the DAO (Deputy Operational Directorate) that any support work was being carried out?
-No. We were not notified of anything.
Although several defendants—such as Eugenio Pino, who was deputy operational director (DAO)—maintain that Kitchen was a legal operation against a corruption suspect, Commissioner Vázquez has stressed that no one provided him (as head of the UDEF) with any type of information about the operation deployed against Bárcenas; nor of the surveillance activated on his wife, Rosalía Iglesias; nor of the existence of a place in Madrid that the woman used as a studio and where, as she said, she kept boxes with the papers that her husband had taken from the PP headquarters; , whom the plot had captured as a confidant… Only, as the witness stressed in court, another commissioner once asked him if he knew anything about an “intelligence operation” about the former popular official, without offering him more details.
What’s more, along these lines, Vázquez has added that the UDEF did not have to resort to another outside group of agents to carry out monitoring. “We had a surveillance section,” he stated. An opinion that was later supported by Commissioner Juan Antonio González, who was in command of the General Police Station of the Judicial Police, on which the UDEF depended, when the investigations into Gürtel began: “In the General Police Station there were support units of all kinds, there was a surveillance unit…”. However, the espionage operation called Kitchen was carried out from another section outside that part of the Police: from the Central Operational Support Unit (UCAO), attached to the General Information Commissariat. In 2013, the UCAO was directed by Commissioner Enrique García Castaño, who admitted his involvement in the plot during the investigation phase.
The “pressures” on Morocho
In the instruction phase of the Kitchen caseChief Inspector Manuel Morocho, principal investigator of the Gürtel casehe denounced; and that they ordered him to downplay The Bárcenas papers. Also, they urged him to remove Rajoy’s name from the body of one of his reports. When the judge asked who told him that, Morocho replied: “That is suggested to me by the entire chain of command, from the person who was then commissioner general, [José García] Losada, to Manuel Vázquez, head of unit, Mr. Gudiña, head of brigade, and the two section heads.” “The meetings were collective and in them I was ordered to change and remove certain issues, which I put at an indicative level,” he added.
But Vázquez, during his statement this Tuesday, has presented a different vision. “I doubt that [Morocho] suffered some kind of pressure,” he commented, after assuring that he was simply experiencing a situation of “self-pressure” to “not make mistakes.” In addition, he has fully entered into the debate that, according to him, they had about whether the former president’s name should be included in a report, following the appearance of “M. Rajoy” in Bárcenas’ notes. According to the commissioner, they had no doubt that “M. Rajoy” was the leader of the PP – “it is as if K. Mbappé appears in Real Madrid’s accounting,” he compared, in reference to the white club’s footballer, Kylian Mbappé. “The question that arose there was whether the annotation was good, because there was a sheet that had the same people, and in one there was M. Rajoy and in another there was not. […] But nothing was covered,” he concluded.
At the same time, the defense of Jorge Fernández Díaz, Rajoy’s Minister of the Interior and the main defendant in the trial, charged this Tuesday against the notary Alberto Vela, who has also testified as a witness. Francisco Martínez, former Secretary of State for Security and number two to the minister, took to that notary two telephone messages that, he said, his boss sent him in the middle of Kitchen and that show that he was aware of the operation. In one of them, dated July 13, 2013, it reads: “Chauffeur. B: Sergio Javier Ríos Esgueva (now he performs that function with his wife).” Fernández Díaz’s lawyer, Jesús Mandri, . “What he attests to is not that those messages have been crossed with Fernández Díaz, but that Francisco Martínez says that he has crossed them with Fernández Díaz,” the lawyer has launched. “Correct. And that in the terminal [del secretario de Estado] That phone number appears to be that of Jorge Fernández Díaz,” Vela replied.
