The so-called Operation Catalonia began its journey with the first steps of the process. On the morning of September 12, 2012, the day after the first massive Diada that would mark the start of the crisis, all the alarms went off in the office of the Minister of the Interior at the time, Jorge Fernández Díaz, while he was contemplating with his team the front pages of the Barcelona press giving full account of what happened. According to sources present in his office, Fernández Díaz assumed that this protest was an infallible indicator of the seriousness of the situation in Catalonia and decided that action had to be taken and so he communicated it to his closest collaborators.
A few days later, on October 10, the first two references to that operation appeared on the agenda of police commissioner José Manuel Villarejo. One about a conversation with the deputy operational director of the Police, Eugenio Pino, and another, later the same day, with Francisco Martínez, chief of staff of Jorge Fernández Díaz, Rajoy’s Minister of the Interior. These are the initial indications documented so far about what Villarejo himself would later baptize Operation Catalonia years later.
Thus, a governmental, political and police maneuver was activated against the procés and the independence leaders, which also acted against private citizens who did not necessarily have ties to that political movement and which took place at least between September 2012 and well into 2016. Villarejo recorded his day-to-day life in his extremely detailed agendas, which La Vanguardia and CrónicaLibre.com have dissected in a joint investigation – and collated with enormous police and judicial documentation – to expose how the operation was conceived.
Even today this continues to be one of the most sordid and dark episodes of democracy. A confluence between the interest of the government of Mariano Rajoy, from his chief of staff and through at least the Ministry of the Interior, and political interest of the PP, at the level of his general secretary, María Dolores de Cospedal, and a pre-existing corrupt network of senior officials police who took advantage of the crisis to offer their services and at the same time expand their extortion businesses and preparation of false dossiers, in this case against residents of Catalonia. Even taking advantage of previous orders from clients to open legal cases against those affected with falsehoods.
The plot had connections and complicity in the judiciary itself, as evidenced by audios and documents that have come to light in recent years. The finishing touch to that dirty war was the manipulation of public opinion, through certain media and journalists who gave credibility to their assemblies and served as a lever to start the legal cases.
Many media, including La Vanguardia, have published a huge amount of information revealing many of the network’s activities, to the point that it is astonishing that only recently a first instance judge in Madrid and the provincial prosecutor’s office have admitted a first complaint, in this case of the businessman Sandro Rosell.
Despite the public words, in parliamentary headquarters, by Pedro Sánchez, the President of the Government, denouncing the “patriotic police”, neither the Prosecutor’s Office nor the Justice have been interested in clarifying what happened, as attested by a long chain of resolutions in which They even decided against magistrates friends of Villarejo. All this, despite the fact that the dissemination of many of the manipulations occurred in the middle of the electoral process, to manipulate it and revealed the behavior of a large number of officials, susceptible to acting in an organized manner to commit crimes.
Silence and total oblivion until the recent resolution of the Madrid investigating judge number 13, Hermenegildo Barrera.
In September 2017, the Congressional Investigation Commission on partisan use in the Ministry of the Interior, under the mandate of Minister Fernández Díaz, recognized that “an unacceptable partisan use was made of the troops, means, and resources of the Department of the Interior and of the State Security Forces and Corps, with an abuse of power that violates essential rules of democracy and the rule of law.”
The date and content of Villarejo’s first notes were revealing: fifteen days after Mas announced the Catalan elections after the failure of his meeting with Rajoy in Moncloa. The references indicated that there had been previous conversations about the objective: to disclose in the press dirty laundry of CiU, the nationalist coalition led by Mas. These were conversations between officials, no less than senior police officers, talking about influencing public opinion through covert means; In no case were they related to an official investigation.
Sources close to Francisco Martínez, however, clarify that it was Villarejo himself who offered to act: “he explained that he was already doing things and had been investigating cases such as the Palau de la Música, about the CDC headquarters in Barcelona; but he is told that he limits himself to making reports so that they can be forwarded to the corresponding units”. Despite this, the recordings made by the commissioner himself indicate that the senior officials knew many of the strangeness of his movements.
How did Villarejo, who at that time had already been on the radar of some suspicions and internal police investigations, come to establish direct links with the minister’s right-hand man? They had been incubated several months before, as soon as the new senior positions arrived at the ministry after the formation of the Rajoy Government, at Christmas 2011.
According to sources familiar with what happened and consulted during this investigation, the introducer of Villarejo was Juan Cotino, general director of the Police for six years, in the Governments of José María Aznar, who died in 2020 as a result of the coronavirus. He was of great influence in the PP and well related to María Dolores de Cospedal, the powerful general secretary of the PP between 2008 and 2018 and at that time president of the Junta de Castilla La Mancha.
– once he left the Interior, he became part of the small group of top popular institutional leaders in the Valencian Community.
Cotino contacted Fernández Díaz to recommend Villarejo, “a great policeman with a lot of information”, to talk about a case of corruption of the PP in Madrid. Not in vain, Cotino continued to use the services of Villarejo in subsequent years, when cases of PP corruption emerged in Valencia in which he was the protagonist. He enlisted the help of the commissioner to obstruct the investigations and obtain advance tips from judicial and police operations.
Fernández Díaz, who, among other things, shared membership in Opus Dei with Cotino, followed his instructions and entrusted his chief of staff with managing the relationship with the commissioner. This occurred around April 20, 2012. And this was what Martínez did, even when he was appointed Secretary of State for the Interior, which confirms Villarejo’s agenda.
On October 26, 2012, two weeks after receiving the order from Pino and Martínez, Villarejo met with Cospedal, a person with enough authority to transmit direct instructions to the Minister of the Interior himself. The link between the two was Ignacio López del Hierro, an old acquaintance of Villarejo, a controversial businessman and, relevantly, Cospedal’s husband.
The meeting, which began a long period of constant contact and exchange of calls between the two, was crucial for the nascent voyage of Operation Catalunya. But Villarejo and Cospedal already knew each other. At least since 2009, when the PP leader, together with her husband, secretly summoned the police officer to her PP office on Calle Génova in Madrid to talk about Kitchen, the operation supposedly organized by the PP leadership to hinder the investigation of justice and for which up to 15 years in prison are now being requested for Jorge Fernández Díaz. At that time, according to Villarejo’s recordings, Cospedal already told the police that Rajoy was aware.
Back to the Catalonia operation, at the meeting on October 26, 2012, the general secretary of the PP discovered her main letter, the friend and leader of the party in Catalonia, Alicia Sánchez Camacho. Cospedal organized the initial meeting for Villarejo with the then popular deputy in the Parliament of Catalonia from which the first list of targets emerged: politicians, businessmen and public figures for their practices of preparing false dossiers.
Sánchez Camacho had the information that Victoria Álvarez, Jordi Pujol Ferrusola’s ex-lover and friend of Jorge Moragas, Rajoy’s chief of staff, matchmaker of the first meeting between the two women, had revealed to him in 2010, before the PP arrived at the Government and from which the famous recording of La Camargue was born. In the list that he provided to Villarejo, in that first exchange of objectives on November 6, 2012, Sánchez Camacho, now a senator, added of his own accord some names to those mentioned by Victoria Álvarez, from Sandro Rosell to the former police chief of Catalonia, the Sumarroca, the Pujol, Felip Puig, Carles Vilarrubí or Jaume Giró; Precisely the latter presented a new complaint yesterday in the Madrid courts against the police leadership. Others are alive in the courts: in those of Andorra, the political and police leadership of the Rajoy cabinet is charged, accused of maneuvering against Banca Privada d’Andorra after trying to extort it to explain whether Jordi Pujol, Artur Mas and Oriol Junqueras had accounts there; the first would end up admitting it. And the bank ended up closed after an intervention by the United States considering – supposedly informed by the Spanish and Andorran authorities – that they had toxic clients. None of them has been convicted for it seven years later.
Villarejo included as part of Operation Catalonia other people about whom neither Sánchez Camacho nor any of his other sources in this matter had told him anything, but against whom he was already preparing maneuvers to fulfill private commissions paid by businessmen. competitors of those affected. This was the case, at least, of Susana Monje, a construction businesswoman, and of Xavier Vinyals, former Latvian consul and president of the Pro Seleccions Catalanes Platform, on which Villarejo had elaborated -at the request of a relative with whom he disputed a company – a report to extort him. That report would end, copied paragraph by paragraph, in an anonymous denunciation that served to indict Vinyals in the Volhov case.
On November 10, 2012, Villarejo met for the first time, separately, with what would be his three main sources in Operation Catalunya: Javier de la Rosa, the man who was convicted up to seven times and sent to prison, at the end of the 1990s due to the looting of the Kuwaiti KIO group and the Grand Tibidabo company; José María Clemente Marcet, a Barcelona businessman sued for fraud on several occasions and with connections to secret services; and Victoria Alvarez.
The day before, the Police staff had met with Fernández Díaz to plan their movements. There were, according to Villarejo’s recordings, in addition to himself, the minister’s chief of staff, Francisco Martínez; the operational director, Eugenio Pino; and José Luis Olivera, head of the Intelligence Center against Organized Crime.
From the conversations that day between Villarejo in Barcelona and his sources, the first leak to the press directly linked to the Catalonia operation was born, published by El Mundo, in which it was stated that the Pujols had 137 million euros in Geneva, data in theory collected in a draft of the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit (UDEF), which never existed and which the police themselves denied. It was one of Villarejo’s inventions, according to himself. The first piece of dominoes.
With De la Rosa and Álvarez, the policeman will establish a long negotiation focused on how much money he will pay them so that they agree to denounce the Pujols before the UDEF, something that the former will do on November 29 and December 6, although in the end he will end up retracting by not receiving only part of the agreed money and the second will formalize a week later, on December 13. Here is the origin of the first legal case, initially against the eldest son of former president Jordi Pujol, then against the entire family once their accounts in Andorra appear.
Cospedal was very aware that December 6 that De la Rosa made his second statement of complaint to the police. Villarejo recorded in his diary that the first payment to the Barcelona financier (150,000 euros) was made that day and that the money had been provided by the president of the Junta de Castilla la Mancha, through the mediation of her chief of staff. The police officer and the politician would meet again to discuss the matter three days later, as stated again in the former’s agenda.
Was the then Prime Minister, Mariano Rajoy, aware of the police maneuvers? The recordings revealed in June 2016 by the Público newspaper indicate that it was. Fernández Díaz, meets with the director of the Antifrau Office of Catalonia, Daniel de Alfonso, on several occasions, and in the appointment they hold on October 16, 2014, the head of the Interior tells him that the president is satisfied. It is that series of conversations in which Fernández Díaz assures that the Prosecutor’s Office “fine tunes it for you” so that it can go forward judicially. What they don’t know is that everything is being recorded. The political ramifications come to light from the very statements of those involved.