The former leader of the PP, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, testified this Monday in the trial for the ‘Operation Kitchen’ and, following in the wake of their ancient PP colleaguesdoes not remember or know of any type of action or illegality that his party carried out when the whole issue of the Bárcenas papers and the subsequent parapolice investigation of the former treasurer and his entourage exploded.
“I don’t remember that information” or “I don’t know” These were the most heard phrases during his brief statement of about ten minutes, in which he defended that there was no type of participation from his party in this entire case. She has indicated on more than one occasion that the only knowledge she had, although at that time she was the Minister of the Presidency, was because of what “I read in the press”.
Neither about the tax regularization that the former treasurer carried out, nor when Bárcenas’ papers appeared, nor if an operation was carried out from the Interior to spy on the former treasurer’s entourage, he has not been able to remember anything.
His statement has been along the same lines as that of his former party colleagues, Mariano Rajoy and María Dolores de Cospedalwho also do not seem to remember everything that happened in those years within their own headquarters.
This Monday the former member of the PP executive also declared, Javier Arenasin which he has defended the legality of his colleagues’ actions. Regarding Bárcenas’ papers, he has reported that he is an “avid reader, in addition to the old ones, of newspapers. I have followed these matters out of obligation in the media, but the first time I physically saw the papers was at the trial, in August 2013.”
At the moment when Bárcenas left the party, after the outbreak of the whole case, he only remembers “tranquillity” among his companions. “I did not observe any concern, because those issues were not talked about,” he added. He has also spoken about the meeting that he, Rajoy, Bárcenas and his wife, Rosalía Iglesias, had at that time.
“I think there was a meeting. It was a human meetingabout a person who had worked for many years in the party and his wife, who is a very educated person, practically did not speak. “There was no talk of economic issues, only of their current situation and their future,” he indicated.
He has also been asked about the audios that Bárcenas claims he had saved and that were destroyed, which included two different conversations, one with Rajoy and another with Arenas himself. It was in a meeting they held in Seville, at the end of 2012, which he has assured that it took place.
“I don’t remember if we talked about the Gürtel“I know that generally he was very hurt, because the actions of the Police and the prosecutors were not being neutral with respect to him,” he explained about the conversation, but he denied the existence of any recording. “What I have observed is that in some media it was stated that this recording existed and in others that it did not exist,” he added.
“I was never aware of that recording. “If it existed, it was without my knowledge or my approval, but I also don’t believe in any concern that it existed,” he explained. Along the same lines, he was asked if he knew that an attempt would be made to obtain the recording that the former treasurer had with Rajoy, to which he responded: “Under no circumstances do I know. That matter It seems like a very confusing issue to me. and I don’t know it.” He has taken the opportunity to defend that the two main defendants, Jorge Fernández Díaz and Francisco Martínez Vázquez, are “great professionals always in public service.”
