The legal services of Congress are opposed to the Chamber denouncing former Interior Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz to the Prosecutor's Office for having lied in two investigative commissions.
The lawyers point out that this action before the Public Ministry would correspond to the political groups that have requested it —Unidas Podemos and other leftist and independentist formations— and not to Congress institutionally.
The Table of the Chamber will have to make a decision this Tuesday, which in all probability will adhere to the recommendations of the legal service.
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The appearance of Fernández Díaz in 2017 before Congress
The revelation by this newspaper of the audio of a conversation in December 2012 between the then Minister of the Interior in the Government of Mariano Rajoy and the retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, in which both address a plan to fabricate false evidence against independence leaders, put revealed that Fernández Díaz had not told the truth in two of his appearances before investigation commissions of the Chamber.
The Penal Code provides for sentences of between six months and one year in prison or a fine of 12 to 24 months for anyone who gives false testimony in these parliamentary commissions.
Fernández Díaz twice denied having had dealings with Villarejo.
The first, on April 5, 2017, when he appeared before the commission that investigated the activities, under his mandate in the Interior, of the so-called
patriotic police
.
Then he assured: "I have never dispatched with Mr. Villarejo."
The former minister returned to testify on December 1 in another commission about his actions in the ministry, in this case the one that investigated the police maneuvers to destroy the evidence on the illegal financing of the PP, known as Operation Kitchen.
On this last occasion, Fernández Díaz declared: "In five years [those he was in the Interior] I only greeted Mr. Villarejo circumstantially on two occasions."
And he clinched: “Why do I dare to say that you will not hear any recording of me with Villarejo?
Because there can't be."
After the publication of the audios in EL PAÍS, last week two requests were submitted to the Chamber Table for it to inform the Prosecutor's Office that the former minister could have committed a crime in his parliamentary testimonies.
The first was from United We Can and then another of the four Catalan independence groups —ERC, Junts, PDdeCAT and CUP—, EH Bildu and BNG, joined.
The lawyers, according to parliamentary sources, have informed the Board on Monday that the work of the aforementioned investigation commissions has already concluded, "so there would be no regulatory channel to articulate a request such as the one now analyzed."
"All of this," the lawyers point out in a note sent to the Board, "without prejudice to the possibility of going directly to the Public Prosecutor's Office [by the requesting groups] under the applicable procedural legislation."
The table will have the last word this Tuesday, where it is certain that both the PSOE and the PP will follow the criteria expressed by the legal services.