Operation Kitchen Trial: Bárcenas Accuses Rajoy of Destroying Evidence

The trial of Operation Kitchen reached its eighth session on April 21, 2026, with former People's Party treasurer Luis Bárcenas and his wife Rosalía Iglesias testifying before the National Court in Madrid. Bárcenas told the court he had possessed three recordings: one in which he himself described the party's off-the-books accounting, a second featuring a conversation with former PP official Javier Arenas, and a third capturing a meeting with former Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy. He recounted that during the Rajoy recording, he had gone to the then-party leader's office to hand him an envelope containing the latest movements of the opaque accounts, and that Rajoy responded by turning in his chair and feeding the document into a paper shredder. Bárcenas said he later instructed his wife to send their driver, Sergio Ríos, to pay a fellow prisoner to delete the Rajoy recording from a cloud storage account. All three recordings, he told the court, have since disappeared.

Driver paid over 53,000 euros from state funds The testimony of Rosalía Iglesias placed particular focus on Sergio Ríos, whom the couple hired as a driver in early 2013 and who is now a defendant in the case.

„We spoke in front of him as if he were one more member of the family” — Rosalía Iglesias via EL PAÍS

Iglesias told the court she later noticed a marked change in Ríos's behavior: he became nervous, drove roughly, and showed unusual interest in knowing whom she had met. According to the case file, Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo recruited Ríos as a confidential informant with the objective of obtaining sensitive documentation that Bárcenas held on senior PP officials. Investigations determined that Ríos was paid more than 53,000 euros drawn from reserved state funds to participate in the plot. The couple also told the court that Ríos had handled highly sensitive tasks, including transporting boxes of material Bárcenas removed from PP headquarters on Génova Street and delivering documents to his then-lawyer Javier Gómez de Liaño — a detail Gómez de Liaño confirmed, saying Ríos "occasionally brought some papers to the office." The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office is seeking a sentence of nearly 12 and a half years in prison for Ríos.

Rajoy, Cospedal, and Zoido set to testify Thursday The session also featured testimony from chief inspector Gonzalo Fraga of the Internal Affairs Unit, who investigated Operation Kitchen and confirmed the existence of diaries, agendas, audio files, and messages documenting what he described as parapolice actions by the leadership of the Interior Ministry aimed at seizing documents that "compromised President Mariano Rajoy." Fraga told the court that former commissioner Villarejo's diaries described the operation "in full detail, with much specificity," and noted that Rajoy was referred to in those records by the nicknames "the Asturian" or "the bearded one." Also scheduled to testify on the same afternoon was police officer José Manuel Benavides, who served as general secretary of the Operational Assistant Directorate between 2006 and September 2013. Former Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy, former PP General Secretary María Dolores de Cospedal, and former Interior Minister Juan Ignacio Zoido are set to appear as witnesses on Thursday, April 23, 2026. Their testimony will follow Bárcenas's claims that Rajoy was directly aware of the party's parallel accounting system.

Operation Kitchen refers to an alleged covert operation carried out in 2013 under the Interior Ministry led by Jorge Fernández Díaz during the government of Mariano Rajoy, who served as Prime Minister of Spain from 2011 to 2018. The operation is alleged to have used state police resources and reserved funds to spy on Luis Bárcenas, who served as PP treasurer until 2009, and to recover documents that could implicate senior party figures in the Gürtel corruption case. The Gürtel case involved a long-running illegal financing network connected to the PP and resulted in convictions of multiple party officials. Bárcenas himself was investigated in the Gürtel case from 2009 onward. The National Court's instruction phase of the Kitchen case was closed by judge Manuel García-Castellón, who decided not to include María Dolores de Cospedal among the accused, a decision that has drawn criticism from some observers.

Notary cleared after tip-off case dismissed in Menorca The eighth session also saw the appearance of notary Alberto Vela Rubio-Navarro, who had originally faced accusations of having alerted former Secretary of State for Security Francisco Martínez that he was under investigation in connection with the Kitchen case. The head of the Court of First Instance and Instruction number 1 of Mahón in Menorca, Daniel García del Mar, agreed to dismiss the case against the notary — a ruling equivalent to res judicata — after both the local judge and the Prosecutor's Office rejected the reasoning of former National Court magistrate Manuel García Castellón, who had referred the matter to the Balearic court on the grounds that there were sufficient indications of a crime of discovery or revelation of secrets. The notary's appearance as a witness rather than a defendant therefore reflected the outcome of that prior judicial process. The session underscored the breadth of the Kitchen case, which spans allegations involving Interior Ministry officials, police commanders, confidential informants, and figures from the upper ranks of the PP during the Rajoy era.