The National Court has ordered the judge to summon the former general secretary of the PP María Dolores de Cospedal to testify as a witness for her knowledge of 'Operation Kitchen'. In an order, the Chamber revokes the decision of the instructor Manuel García-Castellón and agrees with the former lawyer of the former treasurer of the PP Luis Bárcenas, Javier Gómez de Liaño del so that he can be heard in the case and can be summoned as a witness in a piece for the alleged espionage of the lawyer in his capacity as defender of Bárcenas when he had become the enemy of the PP.
In the resolution, the three magistrates explain that Cospedal is not a mere reference witness as the instructor argued to reject her statement. "The fact that he did not intervene in the recorded conversations - on the part of former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo - does not place him in such a position if, as the interveners point out and is reflected in the notes - by Villarejo himself -, he was in meetings, situations or other circumstances that allowed him to directly know the facts investigated in whole or in part".
In his opinion, the former general secretary of the PP "could provide relevant information about the facts", making her statement a "useful and necessary" diligence.
This piece is a derivative of the Kitchen case, in which a 'parapolice' operation orchestrated by the Ministry of the Interior in the Government of Mariano Rajoy is investigated to steal documents from who would have been the treasurer of his party, Luis Bárcenas, and who had threatened to uncover box B of the formation, potentially directly affecting its president.
The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office has always defended that María Dolores de Cospedal was aware of and participated in this operation, as was confirmed through her conversations with Villarejo - one of the defendants in this case - and as this was reflected in his agendas. However, the instructor, after taking her statement, decided to file her case regarding her and her husband.
For the Prosecutor's Office, the biggest loser with the Bárcenas documents was the PP and therefore there was no doubt that the operation was devised from Génova - the street where the national headquarters of the PP is located.
After learning about the Kitchen operation, Bárcenas' lawyer presented himself as injured in another separate piece initiated by the instructor to uncover whether he had been spied on to find out information about Bárcenas.
Prosecutors believe that the PP played an important role in this operation. In fact, Fernández Díaz himself has just presented a brief, in Kitchen's piece that is already in the opening of oral proceedings, claiming that the party to which he belongs should be present in the case as a lucrative participant because if this is true operationally, the beneficiary of this would be the PP and not the Ministry of the Interior that he directed at that time (2013).
