MADRID: Five days before the Bárcenas case starts, the former treasurer of the Partido Popular has announced in a letter to the prosecution that he will fully cooperate with the court with information about the infamous ‘Caja B’.
The ‘caja B’ was a shadow account of the party recording the amount of money received in bribes, for whom it was intended and from which companies they came. In his letter to the Public Prosecution Service, Bárcenas acknowledges the existence of ‘caja B’. It was a deposit for donations and in some cases cash paid in exchange for contracts.
In the letter, to which the newspaper La Vanguardia had access, Bárcenas explains in ten sentences the scandal from his point of view. He places the blame on party leader Mariano Rajoy’s board.
The ten sentences in Bárcenas’ letter
“Since 1982 there has been a financing system of the Partido Popular with income in caja B from donations”.
“In 1997 there was parallel accounting of 500,000 euros and in 2008 of just over one million euros. Of this, €900thousand were used for the renovation of the party building in Madrid.”
“The funds were generally filled with donations or contributions from people related to companies benefiting from major public tenders”.
“The donations were made directly and in cash to Álvaro Lapuerta, where I was personally present a number of times”.
“Some of those donations have not been included in the party accounts submitted to the Court of Audit, to be used for other purposes and to be kept out of the Court’s view”.
“The donors of the money did not ask for receipts, but Álvaro Lapuerta wrote the amounts on a business card as confirmation with each collection.”
“Mariano Rajoy was aware of all these actions in detail, at the beginning of 2009 I even showed him the accounts of Kas B in a meeting at his office and asked him how I should manage to keep this compromising documentation”.
“Rajoy ended up running the documentation through the shredder in person, without knowing that I had kept copies that were later stolen from my wife’s office.”
“To be precise, the following people have enriched themselves with the extra income: Mariano Rajoy, Dolores de Cospedal, Federico Trillo, Pío García Escudero, Franciso Álvarez Cascos, Ángel Acebes, Javier Arenas, Rodrigo Rato and Jaime Ignacio del Burgo”.
“There is a recording in the possession of someone in which it can be heard that Álvaro Lapuerta tells a confidant about the monthly cash income for the said members of the Partido Popular and in which the name of Mariano Rajoy is explicitly mentioned”.
