Corruption suspect claims PP received bribes from companies for contracts

Pablo Crespo, a former ruling Popular Party (PP) leader in Galicia and a key suspect in the Gürtel kickbacks-for-contracts corruption case, has admitted handing over undeclared bonuses in the northwestern region.

In an interview broadcast by commercial television channel laSexta on Sunday evening, Crespo also acknowledged that the PP had financed itself - and insinuated that it continued to do so - in a manner that was not totally above aboard. Crespo confirmed testimony by former PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas, who has claimed he made cash payments in envelopes to a number of party leaders, including Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and PP secretary general María Dolores de Cospedal, both of whom have denied the allegations.

Bárcenas has also alleged that the PP received donations from companies for amounts over the statutory limit and from contributors that were barred from funding parties because they were in receipt of public contracts.

Bárcenas is currently in preventive custody in El Soto jail in the Madrid region and faces possible charges of fraud and money-laundering. His predecessor, Álvaro Lapuerta, appeared in the High Court on Monday, where he had been summoned by investigating judge, Pablo Ruz, to answer questions about Bárcenas' accounting ledgers.

Lapuerta, however, who is 86 and walks with a cane, explained to the judge that he was not in a fit mental state to give testimony, and that he had "memory problems." He left the court after less than an hour.

Crespo, the suspected number two in the Gürtel corruption network, was released from jail at the start of last year after posting bail. He had spent three years in prison. Crespo faces charges of illicit association, influence peddling, money-laundering and tax fraud.

The Gürtel case, which officially broke in 2009, has yet to go to trial.

"I handed out bonus payments in the PP in Galicia," Crespo said in an interview with Jordi Évole on the Salvados current affairs show. "I know the names of those people

[who received the money]. They were PP leaders at the time."

Presenting himself as a victim of a political set-up, Crespo launched a thinly veiled warning to members of the PP. "Some of them should keep quiet. I'd like to meet up with them and show them some papers to see what color their faces turn," he said.

Crespo said illegal party funding by companies was a well-established practice. "Everybody assumed that this was the way things worked; something normal since the 1980s," he said. The former organizational secretary of the PP in Galicia said that in the region alone the PP received annual donations from companies worth some 300,000 euros, sums that increased sharply during election campaigns. "For example, the cost of one campaign was declared at 1.2 million euros when in reality it cost between three and four million," he cited as an example. He said about 35 percent of the donations the PP received in the region were from legitimate sources. "The other 65 percent in cash was not declared."

Crespo said the donations were handed over in offices. "The money was put in a blue folder. The folder wasn't opened and the money wasn't counted. The donors I dealt with were big businessmen in public works and practically all of them were in on it. I didn't ask questions."

Asked why he did not object to the system of party funding, Crespo replied: "Listen, I carried out a duty on which I swore to confidentiality, and that's the way I have done things up until now. These are also matters that, given the time we are speaking about, have gone beyond the statute of limitations. I have stated that there are people who throw their hands up in horror when the subject of our case comes up when they have a lot to keep quiet about, and who speak of Bárcenas as if he had the bubonic plague but still received money under the table from him."

Crespo said he had documentary evidence to back up his claims. "I have documents. There are always papers. People have no idea when they sign during a lifetime."

The former PP official said Gürtel was not a corruption ring in his view but rather a group of companies, and claimed that the whole case had been conjured up by the former Socialist administration for political ends. "This is a Socialist government plot but it's another thing to be able to show this," he claimed. And now, he argued, it was the PP that is out to get them. "They're looking to hit us hard; to present us as a bunch of crooks."