Another scandal for the People’s Party | The old meadows …

Mariano Rajoy was reportedly given bonuses before becoming president of the Spanish government in 2011. This was declared in court on Monday by the former treasurer of the Popular Party (PP), Luis Bárcenas, prosecuted for illegal financing of the local right. Bárcenas, who faces a request from the prosecutor for five years in prison, appeared before the National High Court in a trial that began on February 8 for the payment of nearly one million euros (around 1.2 million dollars) with money. Box B “of the PP for the reform of the national headquarters of the party in Madrid. This undeclared fund has been fueled for decades by donations from businessmen and has been used to pay bonuses to party leaders and collaborators.

“I gave them the envelope with the amount that corresponds to them,” Bárcenas told the anti-corruption prosecutor. Antonio Romeral. The defendant cited among “those listed” as beneficiaries of these illicit payments the former president and seven other politicians who held organic positions in the PP and ministerial portfolios, first with José María Aznar (1996-2004) then with Rajoy (2011-2018).

As Bárcenas explains, the original purpose of the bonuses was to guarantee the same level of pay to Rajoy and other PP leaders when they entered Aznar’s cabinet as ministers in the 1990s. the They were indicted as deputies and also received representation fees from the Spanish conservative party., something made impossible by the law of incompatibilities, which prevents receiving the salary of the minister and the party at the same time.

Later, Box B was extended to other functions, such as paying employees at their discretion or certain elected positions that the party wanted to pamper. “We needed the money for these features to meet the expense of these features,” Bárcenas said.

The former treasurer based his defense on Monday by presenting himself as a mere interpreter of Álvaro Lapuerta, partisan treasurer during the long period he was manager, who died in 2018. “Álvaro and I knew what we were doing was wrong”, but “Álvaro was responsible and I followed his instructions”, he assured.

For his part, prosecutor Romeral focused his questioning of this third day of trial on the alleged black payment for the reform of the headquarters of the PP, which the current party president, Pablo Casado, has announced his intention to get rid of due to suspected irregularities. Bárcenas said he did not know whose initiative to pay for part of this reform with black money, without declaring it to the Treasury.

Rajoy, who has consistently denied the charges, will appear as a witness in this oral trial which should continue until May at the headquarters of the National Court of San Fernando de Henares, east of Madrid.

The former president español will be saved from the clash requested by the defense of Bárcenas since the president of the court alleged on Monday that this technique corresponds to the investigation phase. In any case, the former Tory president will return to the same room in which, in July 2017, he testified as a witness in the main room of his party’s illegal funding.

The plot studied is known as “Gürtel”, a system whereby construction contractors financed the PP, in return for local officials of that party to later award them lucrative public works contracts. In May 2018, the National Court recognized that this irregular accounting had existed for two decades and condemned the conservative group as a “profitable participant”.

The sentence cost Bárcenas a sentence of 29 years in prison, which is currently meeting, and immediately motivated the motion of socialist censure that ousted Rajoy and the PP from power in June 2018.