Barcenas case

The Bárcenas Affair is a corruption scandal in Spain that affects the ruling People’s Party (PP). Following revelations about the Swiss bank accounts of party treasurer and senator, Luis Bárcenas, extracts of handwritten accounts, the so-called “Bárcenas papers” (los papeles de Bárcenas) were published. Those allegedly indicate that the PP kept, for many years, a parallel bookkeeping system to record undeclared and illegal cash donations, and used them to pay bonuses to senior members of the party as well as for daily party expenses.

The documents cover the period from 1990 to 2009, and suggest that regular cash payments had been made from a slush fund. Those include payments of 25,000 euros ($34,000) a year, for eleven years, to the current Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, including, according to El Mundo, during three of the years that he served as minister in José María Aznar's government.

Other leading party figures allegedly involved in the scandal include former ministers Rodrigo Rato, (also a former director general of the IMF), Ángel Acebes, Federico Trillo, and former secretaries-general, who also served as ministers, Francisco Álvarez-Cascos, who allegedly received 421,693 euros between 1990 and 2004, and Javier Arenas, who allegedly received 234,320 euros, and the party’s current secretary general María Dolores de Cospedal, the most senior party member summoned to date to appear before the investigating judge.

On 1 August 2013, after “weeks of holding out against demands that he give some sort of explanation for the corruption and illegal funding scandal that has engulfed” his party, Rajoy was finally forced to address Spain's parliament by the threat of a motion of censure. While admitting to having handled the scandal badly, he denied taking illegal funds.

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Wikipedia