A court in Spain has begun to examine the findings of a long-running probe into an illegal network that spied on people in return for payments, which almost certainly implicates senior figures in the former governing party.
The probe focuses on what is known in
Spain as the Gürtel case, which is described by observers as one of the
most extensive corruption scandals in Spanish political history. It
centers on an extensive network of tax evasion, bribery and money
laundering, which brought together leading business executives, criminal
kingpins, and senior politicians from Spain’s conservative Popular
Party (PP).
In May of 2018, Spain’s highest criminal
court, the Audiencia Nacional, ruled that senior PP officials had
enriched themselves with kickbacks and bribes, and had laundered the
money with assistance from the criminal underworld. The scandal
effectively brought an end to the government of conservative Prime
Minister Mariano Rajoy later that year, and has virtually annihilated
the once robust electoral popularity of the PP.
IntelNews has followed
a series of scandals linked to the Gürtel case, notably a case
involving José Manuel Villarejo, a 67-year-old former police chief, who
was arrested in November of 2017 for carrying out illegal wiretaps, and
remains in custody. According
to Spanish prosecutors, Villarejo was in charge of an illicit
information-collection enterprise that violated the privacy of hundreds
of unsuspecting citizens. The latter were targeted by corporate
competitors and individual wealthy clients. Many of Villarejo’s targets
were eventually blackmailed by the recipients of information collected
by the former police chief and his network.
Now a new side of the Gürtel case is about to emerge, as the Audiencia Nacional has unsealed
a probe that sheds further light into Operation KITCHEN. This refers to
an espionage effort connected to the Gürtel case, which targeted Luis
Bárcenas, a senator and party treasurer of Spain’s conservative Partido
Popular. Bárcenas had in his possession bookkeeping documents that shed
light on a secret system for recording illicit funds in possession of PP
administrators and senior party figures —for which Bárcenas was
eventually given a 33-year prison sentence that he is currently serving.
Once senior government executives were
notified by advisors that Bárcenas had these documents, and that he may
be planning to share them with the authorities in order to secure a
lighter prison sentence for himself, they allegedly set up an espionage
operation aimed at preventing Bárcenas’ documents from ending up in the
hands of the authorities. Villarejo was allegedly in charge of the
espionage operation, which is how Operation KITCHEN connects with the
broader Gürtel case. The probe of Operation KITCHEN was unsealed on
Monday by Audiencia Nacional Judge Manuel García Castellón. A new series
of prosecutions is now expected to take place in the coming weeks, in
connection to Operation KITCHEN, which will almost certainly involve
leading PP figures.
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