Number 13, rue Génova in Madrid has a great symbolic value in the Gürtel affair. From his apartments, Mariano Rajoy tried to convince Spain that the plot did not exist. Registered from top to bottom by the National Court, it was put up for sale by the PP of Pablo Casado and recovered by the PP of Alberto Núñez Feijóo. And it was reformed, as the Supreme Court has just recalled, with money from “box B” that the PP has refused for almost two decades. The Gürtel extends its tentacles into some of the major strongholds of the Popular Party but with the siege of Genoa as the beginning, middle and end of the affair.
The PP moved to its current headquarters in 1983 after a few first years between Gran Vía and Plaza de La Luna in Madrid. The electoral victories of José María Aznar and Mariano Rajoy were celebrated on its balconies. In their corridors and offices, according to the parallel accounting discovered by El País, treasurers Álvaro Lapuerta and Luis Bárcenas recorded the inflows and outflows of money independently of what the party sent, year after year, to the Court of Auditors.
Génova 13 was the place chosen by Mariano Rajoy to speak accompanied by the leadership of the PP in February 2009. There he denied the existence of Gürtel’s plot in the most categorical way possible: “It is not a plot of the PP but against the People’s Party,” he said in a building that they had completely renovated a few years before. This reform, now affirms the Supreme Court, was financed with black money coming from a “box B” which was operating at full capacity until just a few months before the appearance of “Mr. Rajoy” among the beneficiaries.
The sentence, known this Friday in the middle of Carlos Mazón’s appearance on DANA at the Palau de la Generalitat, corrects the errors of the National Court and reduces the sentences of Luis Bárcenas and those responsible for the company that led the reform, to the point of open the door so they don’t have to go to prison to serve their sentence. But he confirms point by point everything concerning the PP: its treasurer used hundreds of thousands of euros from his “B fund” to finance the reform behind the back of the Treasury, thus contributing to tax fraud of several hundred extra euros. thousands of extra euros.
The paradox of the PP’s fortress is that the symbiotic relationship was forged there which, according to the judges, united the party with Gürtel’s plot. Rajoy denied the existence of the Gürtel in the same building where, five years earlier, Esperanza Aguirre claimed to have discovered the plot in front of Rajoy himself. Where Luis Bárcenas maintained an office and more infrastructure years after the affair began. “I spent more time in Genoa than in my office,” said Francisco Correa, considered the commercial mastermind of the plot.
Judge Pablo Ruz was in charge of the case during the key years of the investigation and it was he who sent the National Police to Génova 13 more than ten years ago to search for the contracts of the Unifica company which resulted in this week for final sentencing. the case. The requirements that resembled a register, the familiarity with which the managers spoke of the offices of the building and the phrases that gave truth to everything with a conviction led Pablo Casado to announce the sale of the building.
“We must stop worrying about our past,” he said in February 2021. A few days before the start of the trial for the reform of the seat in the National Court, Casado’s goal was to pay the debts and, in doing so, to dissociate. of the symbol that united the party to a corrupt plot dismantled more than ten years ago. A year later, Casado was politically defenestrated from Génova 13 for denouncing the alleged corruption of Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s brother and Alberto Núñez Feijóo entered the seventh floor of the building.
The sale was aborted and the party remained in its headquarters: “The buildings are not responsible for anything,” he declared a few months before the National Court certified, in a decision today confirmed by the Court supreme, that it was indeed not a question of It is the fault of the building but of the treasurer and finally of the PP who, according to the judges, did not exercise “adequate control” over Luis Bárcenas.
Ongoing sentences and trials
The PP headquarters has been the scene of decades of corruption which, in practice, has allowed the party to finance itself outside the law in some of its major strongholds in Madrid such as Majadahonda, Pozuelo or in the capital itself. Contracts and public awards in exchange for money for events or commissions for public positions. Gürtel’s plot still includes several distinct elements awaiting judgment or definitive conviction, without the judicially proven existence of his “B box” having been debated for years.
The National Court twice sent agents to Génova 13 to request papers and documents. In February 2016, the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard went to obtain evidence of possible irregular financing of the Madrid faction of the PP in the electoral campaigns that elevated Esperanza Aguirre. A case derived from Púnica, and not from Gürtel, now at the doors of trial with the focus on Beltrán Gutiérrez, director of the PP of Madrid who also had his office on Génova Street.
The Supreme Court ruling known this week is not the first to confirm the existence of a “B box” managed from Genova 13 and it remains to be seen if it is the last to rely on its existence to declare Gürtel’s corruption proven. He is also not the first to link his existence to the party and not exclusively to the treasurer.
“An accounting structure parallel to the official structure,” declared the National Court in the 2018 judgment that precipitated the departure of Mariano Rajoy from La Moncloa. Not a plot against the PP, as Mariano Rajoy said when he was not obliged to tell the truth, but against the PP based in his headquarters. Luis Bárcenas did not plunder the PP with open arms, as the party tried to make public opinion believe when the legal proceedings began on the path of no return, but he used the money of “fund B” to reform its headquarters.
