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The leader of Spain’s main opposition party said he was severing all contact with Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy and his People’s Party over a secret payment scandal.
Socialist party leader Alfredo Perez Rubalcaba repeated his calls for Rajoy to step down and said he was “severing all ties” with the government.
“Given the unsustainable political situation in Spain, the Socialist Party calls for the immediate resignation of Mariano Rajoy as head of the government,” he told a press conference in Madrid.
“Mr Rajoy’s conduct in this situation can be summarised quite simply: silence, lies, and after what we have learned today, collusion, extremely serious collusion,” Rubalcaba added.
The centre-right El Mundo newspaper published images of what it alleged was a series of text messages between Rajoy and Luis Barcenas, a former treasurer of the People’s Party (PP) currently in pre-trial detention as part of a separate corruption inquiry.
El Mundo said Barcenas handed over the messages, sent between May 2011 and March 2013, after an angry exchange with the prime minister.
Rajoy kept in “direct and permanent contact” with Barcenas and “asked him to hide the existence of secret accounts and salary top-ups”, El Mundo said Sunday.
“Luis, I understand you, be strong,” said one of the messages purportedly from Rajoy to Barcenas, dated January 18, when El Mundo first revealed the existence of the PP payments scandal.
“It is not good to try to determine what we will say or comment on things that must be presented to the courts, which we must all respect,” read another message allegedly sent by Rajoy.
Carlos Floriano, the PP’s deputy secretary, hit back at Rubalcaba’s comments, saying the Socialist leader was colluding himself with the “lies” of an accused man.
“It is pitiful that Rubalcaba, in his distress, is calling for resignations in collusion with the lies of a man under police investigation.
“The text messages published are the material proof of a blackmail attempt that didn’t work,” Floriano said.