The president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, has ordered this Monday to withdraw the appeal presented by his party on April 19 - and whose content had been known today - against the judicial conviction for the use of black money from box b to pay for the reform of the party's headquarters in Madrid's Génova street in 2007. In that appeal, the PP requested the acquittal of its former treasurer Luis Bárcenas as a necessary step to be able to also request that of the party itself, which was sentenced as subsidiary civil liability.
The current popular leadership maintains that it was not aware of the terms of that resource - which it attributes to the previous leadership, that of Pablo Casado - and that it disagrees with them, for which it will withdraw it.
“We did not know him and, knowing him, we do not share him”, said the Deputy Secretary for Institutional Policy,
The dome of the PP of Feijóo assures that it has found out this morning, reading it in the press, of the existence of the resource;
and, although he understands why he came forward, he believes that it cannot be explained politically.
"The national leadership has learned today through the media that an appeal filed by the party's lawyers calls for the acquittal of Bárcenas," said González Pons, asked about it after the meeting of the popular leadership committee.
“This resource was written in the month of November, and as far as we know it was presented
ad cautelam
three days before the national congress [of the PP, held on April 1 and 2].
We understand that it falls within the logic of defending the honorability of the party, since we are sure that the PP is innocent and that it was unjustly convicted.
But, in this case, the legal strategy collides with the political logic.
And when the legal strategy cannot be explained politically, this leadership thinks that politics should outweigh the legal strategy.
That is why the management has made the decision to withdraw that resource today, ”he explained.
mess of dates
However, González Pons's version of the dates does not coincide with the one contained in the letter itself.
The lawyer for the popular party, Jesús Santos, dated and signed the appeal on April 19, 17 days after Feijóo's election as president of the party in the PP congress.
On April 20, his attorney signed it.
Management sources have insisted later, when this extreme has been pointed out to them, that Feijóo's team did not know the terms of that letter, and they recognize that it is "a problem" that they will have to deal with the lawyer, because they should have known him.
The appeal presented by the PP asks that its former head of finance be acquitted in order to avoid the penalty imposed on the formation: the payment of 123,669 euros as subsidiary civil liability for the payment of more than one million euros to the Unifica company "apart from billing and official accounting", with funds "not declared to the Public Treasury".
It is a question, therefore, of seeking an acquittal in a cascade, because if Bárcenas' conviction is annulled, that of the PP also declines.
The problem is that this forces Bárcenas to defend, as the PP's lawyer does in a 46-page brief, despite the fact that he is a person who embodies the black hole of corruption in the PP and whom the party turned its back on it a long time ago.
In the appeal, the PP lawyer exposes his arguments in favor of the former treasurer and former manager of the formation for almost two decades and repeatedly asks for his acquittal.
The moment in which the appeal was made known could not be more counterproductive for the Popular Party, a week before the Andalusian elections, in which its candidate, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, aspires to achieve a large majority.
Feijóo has moved quickly announcing that he was withdrawing the appeal to try to prevent the issue from weighing down his electoral expectations.
Since he came to the popular presidency, Feijóo has tried to distance himself from the ballast of corruption that the PP still drags in the courts.
The popular leader has, however, renounced selling the Genoa headquarters, as Pablo Casado announced at the time (although he never carried it out) to thereby symbolize that they were breaking with the previous stage.
He has also avoided condemning the behavior revealed in the audios published by EL PAÍS that show that the party maneuvered to prevent
Bárcenas' papers from
coming to light.