The Court of Barcelona considers that the investigation into the external expenses of the process must be judged together with the case on the preparations for the referendum. This is stated in a car to which La Vanguardia has had access. With this decision, after two years, one of the last stumbling blocks that paralyzed the progress of the 1-O cause, in which there are forty former high-ranking government officials charged, is unraveled. This investigation that is being followed in court 13 of Barcelona is the origin of the case that ended up condemning the pro-independence leaders and that directed, for example, the entry and search of the Ministry of Economy on September 20, 2017, which unleashed a protest of thousands of people.
In parallel, there was another investigation that was opened after a report from the Court of Accounts in court 18 that reviewed the expenses destined for the foreign promotion of the process and Diplocat (The Council of Public Diplomacy of Catalonia). Some of the defendants were the same in both courts. Albert Royo and Aleix Villatoro, former officials of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, argued that they could not be tried twice for the same facts or for related facts and now the Court has agreed with them, considering that there is a “connection” between the two cases. . Therefore, all the defendants in court 18 are now being investigated by court 13 in the cause of the preparations for the referendum.
It so happens that the ex-minister Raül Romeva, who was charged in the Diplocat case, will be investigated again in the referendum case for which he was already sentenced by the Supreme Court. However, the facts now attributed to him are different. Romeva is charged with the crimes of embezzlement, prevarication and document falsification for having awarded a grant of 40,000 euros to an association to help the international projection of Catalonia. The Prosecutor’s Office considers that it was granted arbitrarily. In addition to Romeva, the former Secretary of the Government Víctor Cullel, the former Secretary of Foreign Affairs, Roger Albinyana, among others, were being investigated in the case.
In the order, the judges maintain that all the facts “are related to a greater or lesser extent with the separatist process carried out from 2011 to 2017 in Catalonia” and the connection between both procedures is “evidence”. The court points out that both processes implied the contracting and commitment of expenses beyond the competences derived from Spanish law, whose ultimate purpose was to sustain the sovereignist process and achieve independence with public goods (…), evading the system’s controls on said money”.
