María Dolores de Cospedal, former secretary general of the PP and former Minister of Defence, returned to the National Court on Tuesday to testify in another line of investigation in the Villarejo case. Minutes before ten o'clock in the morning, the former popular leader returned to the judicial headquarters to sit before magistrate Manuel García-Castellón, this time as a witness, after the Criminal Chamber ordered her to be summoned to ask him if he knew anything about the alleged maneuvers deployed a decade ago to pressure one of Luis Bárcenas' first lawyers. Javier Gómez de Liaño. These pressures were allegedly aimed at preventing the former treasurer of the party from spreading more information about the corruption of the party, surrounded by the publication of the Bárcenas papers in early 2013. On his arrival at the National Court, Cospedal refused to make statements to the media. Already in front of the judge, the former politician has denied any knowledge of the facts under suspicion, according to several legal sources.
The plots hatched against Luis Bárcenas have so far resulted in two different lines of investigation of the Villarejo case: on the one hand, the alleged pressure on the former treasurer's lawyer (the so-called Piece 36 of the summary); and, on the other hand, Operation Kitchen (Piece 7), consisting of the parapolice deployment organized from 2013 within the Ministry of the Interior to allegedly rob Bárcenas of possible sensitive documentation that he could keep on senior PP officials. Precisely, Cospedal was charged in the Kitchen case, since the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office suspected that she participated in that irregular deployment. but the magistrate shelved the case against her by limiting all responsibility to the Department of the Interior, headed by Jorge Fernández Díaz.
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The Court orders the summons of Cospedal for the alleged pressure on a lawyer of Bárcenas
In June 2021, during her statement as a defendant on the plot hatched in the Interior Ministry, Cospedal already minimized her relationship with retired police commissioner José Manuel Villarejo. The Popular Party assured that she never commissioned her to torpedo the Gürtel case (the summary that surrounded the PP for corruption), but admitted that she had dispatched alone with the policeman on several occasions at the headquarters in Genoa. These attempts by the former politician to underestimate her contacts have always clashed with the evidence incorporated into the file, which abounds with the commissioner's notes on his meetings – as well as with the husband of the PP leader, the businessman Ignacio López del Hierro – and the profuse messages and calls that the agent exchanged with the former secretary general and her closest circle.
Cospedal, this Tuesday upon his arrival at the National Court, in Madrid. Claudio Álvarez
He insisted on this line on Tuesday, during his new statement before García-Castellón. According to several legal sources, Cospedal has once again acknowledged that she met with Villarejo in her capacity as secretary general of the party; And that she did it because she knew that the commissioner handled information and she suspected that there were people who wanted to harm the party. But, according to the former minister, they did not talk about Gürtel, and she does not remember that the policeman gave her information about Bárcenas' legal defense (she has gone so far as to say that she does not remember who paid the lawyer to the former treasurer, despite the fact that a decade ago he acknowledged in a press conference that the party did it). The former politician has also stressed that they never talked about Gómez de Liaño and that she does not know any of those involved in this Piece 36: "I am knowing the facts at this time. [...] I don't know anything I've been asked," he said, according to legal sources.
Villarejo already referred to this relationship on Monday, at the doors of the National Court, where he went to testify as a witness in the case about the alleged pressure on the lawyer Gómez de Liaño: "The meetings I had with Cospedal were for the exchange of information. It's likely that he asked me about it," the commissioner said, adding after testifying before the judge: "I made some arrangements. I always reported everything to the high authorities of the Interior and the National Intelligence Center (CNI). As an intelligence agent, I briefed them. I don't know how they used [that information]."
The thread that connects all these characters is found in Villarejo's diaries, intervened in the macro-cause. According to his notes, the commissioner collected information about Gómez de Liaño and contacted third parties who allegedly had a relationship with him previously. The lawyer had defended Russian mafia leader Zakhar Kalashov and, according to the Criminal Chamber, the policeman was trying to check whether the lawyer received irregular payments from his client. All this in a context of high tension: Gómez de Liaño had assumed the defense of the former treasurer of the PP in July 2013, almost half a year after the publication of the Bárcenas papers and when the pressures were multiplying to prevent him from confessing the irregularities committed within the conservative formation.
The summary reflects that Villarejo noted that, in 2014, he had a conversation with Halit Sahitaj, an alleged intermediary connected to Kalashov: "Interesting subject. He says he personally paid a lot of cash to Liaño," she wrote of him. In addition, as a result of a search of Sahitaj's home – as part of an investigation by a Marbella court – four audio files were accessed, which, on 20 October 2014, were sent to the email address of Gómez de Liaño's professional office. "Such audio files [...] would reveal, in an indicative manner, an assignment made by third parties linked to the PP in order to achieve, through pressure on Luis Bárcenas and his lawyer, that compromising or harmful information for the Popular Party linked to the Gürtel summary did not come to light," said the Chamber.
Retired police commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, this Monday in the surroundings of the National Court. ZIPI (EFE)
These recordings include conversations of third parties investigated in Piece 36: the lawyer José Luis Moreno Cela, his client Mónica Gil Manzano and the businessman Juan Ramón Díaz Moro. "[They] allude to an alleged commission by people linked to the PP of services aimed at obtaining information related to Bárcenas, accused [then] in a criminal proceeding, and his defense lawyer in this proceeding, Gómez de Liaño, which could be used to pressure both of them and prevent them from being able to disseminate compromising data for that party," the Criminal Chamber insisted on the resolution ordering the summons of Cospedal. Of all this, the former secretary general says that she knows nothing: that she does not know Kalashov and that, of all the lawyers of the accused in Gürtel, she only met with Javier Iglesias a couple of times because he defended Álvaro Lapuerta, former treasurer of the party before Bárcenas. The judge has not asked him any questions.
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