The 'former number two' of the PP Interior: "My big mistake was being loyal to miserable people like Jorge, Rajoy or Cospedal"

One of the most dangerous elements for an organization involved in a corruption case are the so-called “widows of power”, named after the Argentine investigative journalist Daniel Santoro.

They are those people who once held a relevant position in a government, a party or a company, and who after falling from grace, leave, more voluntarily than by carelessness, exposed the secrets of people who occupy higher positions in the institution want them to remain hidden.

The summary of the Kitchen case, the plot of police espionage to the ex-treasurer of the PP Luis Bárcenas, has in the former number two of Interior Francisco Martínez an illustrative example of these "widows of power."

At that moment of anxiety and at the gates of a formal accusation that arrived last January, Martínez left a notarial record of messages that directly implicate former Minister Fernández Díaz in the corrupt plot, whose accusation, requested by the Prosecutor's Office, is now being studied by the judge of the Manuel García-Castellón National Court.

Also - perhaps in a careless way, although it is difficult to believe with all the time he has had to get rid of them - he allowed the messages from his mobile phone to end up in the hands of the investigators who registered, this time with the authorization of the judge, his address On March 14, news that was practically buried by the covid-19 pandemic.

One of the people with whom Martínez contacted, on June 5, 2019, when it was already suspected that he was going to be charged in this piece of the Villarejo case macro-summary, was the president of the National Court, José Ramón Navarro.

In a fragment of the conversation, Martínez thanks the magistrate and comments: “You know that they have used me vilely.

One another.

(…) All I did was work.

With a huge personal and family cost.

And now this ”.

Navarro limited himself to answering "I know, I know" and adding an emoticon with a neutral face.

Next, the former secretary of state and former deputy adds: “This will be the first statement by a politician, which will be followed by several more, because as you know very well my great mistake in the ministry was to be loyal to miserable people like Jorge [Fernández Díaz ], Rajoy or Cospedal ”.

In case the message rescued from his mobile and never deleted was not clear enough, Martínez continues: “And from that, fortunately, I have everything very clear and very easy to prove.

And I assure you it is the last thing I wanted to do ”.

Francisco Martínez's mobile is lavish in barely veiled references to the former president of the Government Mariano Rajoy and the former secretary general of the PP Dolores de Cospedal.

On the eve of his statement before Judge García-Castellón, the former number two of the Interior contacted Silverio Nieto, Fernández Díaz's priest and confessor.

And it informs him: "The defense demands to deliver in court the notarial acts in which the messages received throughout 2013 and 2014 are recorded, with very clear and explicit instructions on the alleged 'police operations' that all this deals with" .

And then he values ​​that those minutes "necessarily entailed the summons of Jorge and probably Rajoy."

"Of course nothing is further from my desire," he clarifies.

In another conversation, with the commissioner Enrique García Castaño,

, also accused and who has testified against him, suggests a possible agreement between lawyers and warns: “Obviously I will defend myself with all the arguments and the piece will continue to grow because they will call Jorge (at least) ”.

The messages were never deleted.

Martínez, Secretary of State for Security between 2012 and 2016 when Jorge Fernández Díaz was Minister of the Interior and Mariano Rajoy President of the Government, was soon identified by the Internal Affairs investigators of the Police as one of the main responsible for the covert operation he dealt with to snatch, without any kind of judicial authorization, documents and recordings from the popular ex-treasurer Bárcenas that could be compromising for the party.

Without great footholds within the party after the arrival of Pablo Casado to the presidency of the PP, this brilliant jurist - he was an extraordinary prize in Law and number 1 in his promotion of access to a lawyer in the Cortes -, was stripped of his seat in the Congress while, at 45, saw how the doors of private companies were closing one after another.