PP’s indictment for evidence destruction throws hurdle in Rajoy’s path

Barcelona"I don't know if the PP has been indicted", answered Mariano Rajoy six months ago when asked about the destruction of ex-treasurer Luis Bárcenas' computers. After the party’s top executive was summoned to make a statement about the erasure of the computers’ disks, the PP leader reasoned that “this is what companies do when someone quits their job". Since last Tuesday, only two days before meeting with the King of Spain in consultations over the investiture —and in the middle of negotiating the presidency of the Spanish government— now Rajoy knows that the PP will be prosecuted in this case. It will be the first time in Spain’s democracy that a political party is indicted. One more headache in the middle of the stalemated negotiations, in which yesterday Pedro Sánchez, Pablo Iglesias, and Albert Rivera reproached the PP leader, now in the eye of the hurricane.

The judge of Court Number 32 in Madrid, Rosa María Freire, finalized her investigation and decided to prosecute the PP as a legal entity for the destruction of the hard disks and the alleged commission of the crime of computer damage and cover-up. The writ also includes charges against the party's IT technician, José Manuel Moreno, its treasurer and top executive Carmen Navarro, and PP legal counsel Alberto Durán. The judge has charged them with committing an IT offence for destroying laptops "on purpose and employing the most drastic erasure technique: overwriting them 35 times and scratching them to the point of physical destruction”.

On the count of computer damage, the judge states that Durán ordered the destruction of the hard disks with the aim of obliterating all the files that they contained. She also stated that the current treasurer “was well aware of the circumstances of the seizure and custody" of Barcenas' devices, and expressly allowed Moreno, her subordinate, to delete their contents. This latter party will be prosecuted for carrying out the order to destroy evidence "even though he was not hierarchically required to do so”.

Although the PP and the three defendants stated before the judge that the destruction of the laptops had been conducted according to party protocol, the judge argued that "no internal security protocol exists", as the document submitted by the PP cannot be considered "serious and rigorous". Thus, the PP will be prosecuted as a legal entity for not having established "an adequate organizational and management model for preventing the commission of this crime”.

The judge believes that by using "drastic techniques" for the "physical destruction" of the hard disks, the PP attempted to "prevent important data to do with its fraudulent accounting system and other items that Bárcenas had saved on his laptop computers" from being used in the investigation.

The judge's decision --which the PP has already announced that it will appeal, as it regards it as "clearly unfounded and not within the law"-- is at odds with the prosecutor’s wish for the case to be dismissed. Rosa María Freire believes that one cannot conclude that the computers belonged to the PP, and also notes that it was impossible to prove that the IT devices were blank when the hard disks were formatted, as the PP claims.