The inspector who reported pressure when investigating Gürtel declares this Wednesday
The court that judges the alleged parapolice operation to spy on former PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas will hear key testimony today, that of Manuel Morocho, chief inspector of the UDEF and main investigator of the Gürtel case, who denounced pressure from the entire chain of command.
The National Court seeks to elucidate whether the leadership of the Ministry of the Interior of the first Government of Mariano Rajoy orchestrated an operation between 2013 and 2015 to obtain documentation in the hands of the former treasurer and prevent “material that could potentially incriminate the Popular Party and its leaders” from ending up in the procedure in which Gürtel was then being investigated.
Morocho was the main investigator of the Gürtel case in the Economic and Financial Crime Unit (UDEF) and the Kitchen plot would also have put pressure on him to remove him from this PP corruption case, whose first sentence in 2018 led to the motion of censure that ended the Rajoy Government.
This inspector testified during the investigation phase, in June 2021, and spoke of pressure “from the entire chain of command”, which led him to take “internal security” measures regarding certain procedures, such as hiding the “registration” at the PP headquarters.
Before the investigating judge, he said that he was ordered not to include in his reports the names of “any political official”, with specific mention of Rajoy, a point that throughout the trial Kitchen has been denied by several of his superiors, who have also testified as witnesses.
He also maintained in investigation that said pressure began after he included in one of his reports Ignacio López del Hierro, husband of the former general secretary of the PP María Dolores de Cospedal (both accused in Kitchen), because he was a “friend of Villarejo”, one of the former commissioners accused in this case. His testimony was key to the indictment of the former head of the UDEF José Luis Olivera, who he said tried to separate him by offering him a position in Lisbon during a meeting in which this accused had also allegedly received a call from former Minister of the Interior Jorge Fernández Díaz, also in the dock.
Morocho also explained that he could not trust some police officers and that every time he went to the National Court he ended up finding out about it from the deputy operational director, Eugenio Pino – also accused in the case – who in 2015 assigned him to his unit where, according to his version, he was overloaded with work while continuing his investigations into the PP’s alleged box B.
The diaries seized from former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo contain notes on those dates with references to “MOROCHO-LISBOA”, along with the note “CHISCO”, which according to Kitchen’s main investigator is the nickname with which this commissioner referred to the former Secretary of State for Security Francisco Martínez, who is also being tried. (Efe)
