The complaint admitted for processing by the Investigating Court number 13 of Madrid, presented by Sandro Rosell, points to four agents or former police officers, three from the National Police and one from the North American FBI: José Manuel Villarejo, Antonio Giménez Raso, Alberto Estevez and Marc L. Varri. They are accused of the alleged crimes of criminal organization, falsification of an official in an official document, false accusation and complaint, embezzlement of public funds and illegal arrests. The complaint mentions other people against whom “for the moment” the complaint is not directed but who could eventually be part of the denounced plot, including the former president of the Popular Party of Catalonia Alicia Sánchez-Camacho, and the blogger José Luis Pérez, who on the Sandro Rosell transparency website published numerous leaks about the alleged police investigations opened against the former Blaugrana president.
The factual account maintains that within the framework of the so-called Catalonia operation, orchestrated from 2012, various commanders of the National Police Corps, members of the government and the Popular Party, with the “invaluable help of certain journalists and the media”, they colluded to discredit the Catalan independence movement with all kinds of tricks.
As president of Barça (he was between July 1, 2010 and January 23, 2014), Rosell would have been a piece to splash for this plot, which considered him related to the independence movement.
The interest towards him on the part of the so-called “patriotic police” that Villarejo served is recorded: on November 6, 2012, he met with Sánchez-Camacho at her home and gave her a dozen names for his “Barcelona plan ”, according to an audio revealed by the digital El Món and that the complaint includes. Villarejo will write down some of those names in his diary, and his phone numbers, although not Rosell’s, which does appear numerous times later in his personal diary. Also on that list is Susana Monje, a former director of the Barcelona Football Club who denounced having been the victim of police blackmail into revealing information about the Pujol family.
One of the key people at the start of the investigations against the independence movement was the ex-girlfriend of Jordi Pujol Ferrusola – the former president’s eldest son – who was the one who informed Sánchez-Camacho at a meal – at the La Camarga restaurant, also recorded – that the family had abundant black money in Andorra.
It is also Álvarez who, according to the complaint, put Villarejo in contact (on January 8, 2014) with the blogger José Luis Pérez, who managed various websites in which he published unverified information about Rosell and other people close to Barça; Pérez would be sentenced for coercion because he demanded money in exchange for not publishing false news.
Villarejo’s agenda includes several appointments with Pérez starting on January 10, 2014. The blogger also met the now-defendant Giménez Raso, Villarejo’s trusted man in Catalonia, with whom he discusses the “Rosell affair” in their meetings.
The complaint states that in May 2014 the former commissioner contacted a collaborator of his, FBI agent Marc L. Varri, attached to the American embassy in Madrid. He wants to analyze information about Rosell provided by Pérez. A recording of this appointment is recorded in the main judicial summary that affects Villarejo, the preliminary proceedings 96/2017 of the Central Court of Instruction 6 of the National Court.
Villarejo and Varri had had a common interest: the Barcelona financier José María Clemente Marcet -Clone in Villarejo’s diaries-, with whom the commissioner had business since at least 2006, and whom the American was trying to get closer to. Clemente collaborated with Colombian drug traffickers in money laundering and has business tentacles in various branches, several of them in Spain.
One of the key points in Rosell’s complaint is an alleged injunction by the United States regarding Fifagate, which would have served as a pretext for the Spanish police to initiate an investigation into the former Barça president. The American Department of Justice chose Varri as interlocutor in the case. The Americans linked Rosell to soccer corruption scandals and asked for information about his bank accounts in Spain. These investigations are what led to the arrest, on May 23, 2017, of Sandro Rosell. The source of information for the International Commission Rogatory (CRI) were “some supposed ‘cooperating witnesses’ called ‘TC1’ and ‘TC2’ who would never be identified,” the complaint says.
The CRI “contained errors”, such as that Rosell had an account at the Goldman Sachs bank in the United States, from which he would have transferred 3 million euros to another Caixabank account; Yes, it did, but in the United Kingdom, which “proves to what extent it is anomalous that the US authorities had an interest in an operation totally unrelated to its banking and financial system, unless the information they were given came from a Spanish source, which is the country where the entity receiving the funds was located”, adds the complaint.
The defendant Alberto Estévez was an agent of the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit (UDEF) to which Villarejo “entrusted the writing of reports” against militants or supporters of the independence movement.
It was he who signed various reports after receiving the CRI. Estévez “would have acted under the orders of Brigade Chief José Luis André Vega,” according to the complaint, which has not been denounced.
Rosell was formally investigated by the prosecution for alleged bribery to the president of the Brazilian Football Confederation (CBF) that would have harmed it in the exploitation of broadcasting rights for various football matches. The events had occurred outside of Spain in 2006 and were reported in 2017. The CBF itself issued a certificate denying that it had been harmed. To make matters worse, the crime of corruption between individuals did not exist in Brazil, nor in Spain before 2010. An American prosecutor, according to Rosell’s defense, denied that that country had any interest in him because of Fifagate.
Rosell spent almost two years in pretrial detention and ended up acquitted of all charges.
In an interview on TV3, Villarejo himself stated that Rosell was accused by the judge of the National Court Carmen Lamela in exchange for his subsequent promotion to the Supreme Court. That is the current destiny of him.
