Hell’s kitchen

As I write, scan­dal after scan­dal is bub­bling its way up out of the darker con­duits of the Span­ish state, re­veal­ing a net­work of cor­rup­tion, dirty tricks, co­er­cion, black­mail, and il­le­gal fund­ing that in­volve at least two pre­vi­ous Par­tido Pop­u­lar (PP) gov­ern­ments. Much of this has been over­looked in the in­ter­na­tional press, per­haps be­cause the fi­nan­cial fraud and ex­tra­mar­i­tal for­ni­ca­tion in­dulged in so en­thu­si­as­ti­cally by the for­mer King of Spain (now ex­iled against his will in a lux­ury hotel in Abu Dhabi, where, ac­cord­ing to the Daily Tele­graph, he is ’get­ting bored’) makes for more eas­ily di­gestible copy than do the afore­men­tioned scan­dals, which are com­plex and dif­fi­cult to put in con­text.

Lurk­ing at the heart of them all is a per­son­age called José Manuel Vil­larejo, who be­tween 1972 and 1983 worked mainly in Eu­skadi, in the anti-ter­ror­ist de­part­ment of the Span­ish Na­tional Po­lice. Be­tween 1983 and 1993 he moved into the pri­vate sec­tor, run­ning 46 dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies, in­clud­ing a de­tec­tive agency, be­fore being put back on the state’s pay­roll as a se­cret in­ves­ti­ga­tor for the Min­istry of the In­te­rior. One of his jobs was to in­ves­ti­gate an im­pos­tor called ’Lit­tle Nicolás’, a law stu­dent who man­aged to bluff his way into the high­est ech­e­lons of Span­ish so­ci­ety, roy­alty in­cluded. Vil­larejo’s in­ves­ti­ga­tion turned out to have been car­ried out using al­legedly il­le­gal record­ings and tam­pered ev­i­dence. When threat­ened with jail, he threat­ened the state back with se­cret in­for­ma­tion he had gath­ered in­volv­ing the then King Juan Car­los (yes, him again) and the du­bi­ous meth­ods of the Span­ish In­tel­li­gence Ser­vices. He was jailed in 2017, and Spain’s Na­tional Court launched a mul­ti­ple in­ves­ti­ga­tion – known as ’Op­er­a­tion Tan­dem’ – into his ac­tiv­i­ties. Part seven of Op­er­a­tion Tan­dem has been dubbed ’Op­er­a­tion Kitchen’.

To un­der­stand just which op­er­a­tion this is, and please bear with me, it’s nec­es­sary to know that Luis Bárce­nas, the PP’s trea­surer, had been slip­ping il­lic­itly tax-free sums of money in the form of ’gifts’ from var­i­ous com­pa­nies and in­di­vid­u­als to prime min­is­ters Aznar (al­legedly) and Rajoy as well as at least seven PP cab­i­net min­is­ters be­tween 1990 and 2008 (in­clud­ing, for ex­am­ple, an an­nual pay­ment of €26,000 to Rajoy over an 11-year pe­riod). When Bárce­nas was rum­bled by the media, the PP de­cided to use the po­lice to lo­cate and de­stroy the doc­u­ments in which Bárce­nas had con­sci­en­tiously recorded every last one of these gen­er­ous kick­backs. The PP’s first port of call was none other than the se­cret agent Vil­larejo, who, to­gether with one Eu­ge­nio Pino, a rank­ing Span­ish po­lice of­fi­cer, greased the palm of Bárce­nas’s chauf­feur (nick­named ’the cook’ in coded mes­sages) to the tune of €48,000 taken from ’re­served funds’ con­trolled ex­clu­sively by the Span­ish min­is­ter of the in­te­rior at the time, Jorge Fernández Díaz, in the hope that the ’cook’ could find out where Bárce­nas kept his in­crim­i­nat­ing ev­i­dence. Vil­larejo and Pino had di­rect lines of com­mu­ni­ca­tion both to the PP’s gen­eral sec­re­tary and to Rajoy him­self.

Al­though Op­er­a­tion Kitchen is now dredg­ing up a slag heap’s worth of in­sti­tu­tional cor­rup­tion, the devil, as ever, is in the de­tail. For ex­am­ple, Eu­ge­nio Pino – the po­lice of­fi­cer who is im­pli­cated to­gether with Vil­larejo in ’Op­er­a­tion Kitchen’ – let slip dur­ing a court hear­ing that the Span­ish po­lice had car­ried out other op­er­a­tions that ’would make your skin crawl’, but were for the ’good of Spain’. (The pre­sid­ing judge ir­ri­ta­bly asked him to stick to the case in hand). Even more re­veal­ing are the taped con­ver­sa­tions be­tween Vil­larejo and var­i­ous top ba­nanas in the PP, in which he re­veals his in­volve­ment in ’Op­er­a­tion Cat­alo­nia’ (de­signed to stop the in­de­pen­dence move­ment, in part by de­stroy­ing the Cata­lan pub­lic health ser­vice and co­erc­ing the Banca Pri­vada An­dor­rana into il­le­gally dis­clos­ing the bal­ances of any pro-in­de­pen­dence politi­cians it might have had as clients). On the tapes, the moan­ing tone of Vil­larejo’s voice, his easy swear­ing and dom­i­neer­ing de­liv­ery make him sound like one of those bor­ing boors you hope don’t try to strike up a con­ver­sa­tion if you find your­self alone in a bar. The PP gov­ern­ments, on the other hand, seem to have been more than happy, for years on end, to lend his kitchen Span­ish an ear.