Judge Manuel García-Castellón, head of court number 6 of the National Court, has taken four years to clear the way so that Jordi Pujol Ferrusola’s lawyers can appeal to the court against their decision to refuse to impersonate the victim in the Tandem case, the macro-cause investigated by Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo.
Lawyers Albert Carrillo and Cristóbal Martell have presented the appeal that will make the room pronounce and in which they argue that Villarejo participated in three types of crimes against Pujol Ferrusola: “Intrusions into the home, capture under price of witnesses pretending to be in charge and preparation of false commercial documentation”, as police reports also testify.
Among which a report from the internal affairs unit, which includes an information note prepared by the commissioner, “result of an investigation without a framework or judicial mandate for which findings and obtaining bank data are attributed and which would be a consequence of ‘a coercive action on bank executives [of Banca Privada d’Andorra (BPA)], criminal insofar as they would get these executives to reveal, without intervention or judicial authorization, bank details of the Pujol family’. Villarejo assumed authorship of the note at a notary in Andorra.
The appeal is accompanied by the statements of Higini Cierco, then the first shareholder of BPA, in the courts of Andorra and in which he details the threats of the Spanish police who demanded information about the Pujols and other pro-independence politicians, on pain of losing Banco Madrid , its subsidiary in Spain.
It is not the only appearance of Villarejo in the case against the Pujols, the father, his wife Marta Ferrusola and the children. In fact, the investigation began in December 2012, in full deployment of Operation Catalunya, with a complaint by María Victoria Álvarez, former student of Pujol Ferrusola, first to the police and later to court number 5 of the National Court. The complainant was instructed and led to the judge, in addition to being paid, by Villarejo and other agents. Villarejo did the same with the convict Javier de la Rosa, but since he did not collect the whole agreed, he backed out.
The then judge in charge of the case, Pablo Ruz, took a statement from Victoria Álvarez, together with the representative of the accused, the lawyer Javier Melero, and in view of their inconsistency, he ordered the filing. But the court revoked it and forced him to an instruction to which the accounts in Andorra would later be added. This was the original sin of the matter, which was followed by a good number of irregularities, such as the attempt by the number two of the Police, Deputy Director of Operations Eugenio Pino, to introduce adulterated evidence, in this case a memory stick, which cost him a one-year prison sentence.
García-Castellón, with the support of the Prosecutor’s Office so far, has opposed this personation and others with two arguments. The first, that Tandem is investigating the private hiring of the ex-commissioner – through the group, Villarejo’s company – to provide services that he could not perform given his status as an active police officer and sometimes, with the use of investigation restricted to the forces and security bodies of the State; it was crystallized in an order or project under a budget and with payment of a price for the illicit activity”.
An argument that contradicts the fact that, in the main case so far against Villarejo, the Kitchen case, an operation to obstruct the PP corruption investigation, there is no financial charge. An assumption that involves considering any action by Villarejo as legal, like most of those related to the Catalonia operation, as long as it is not proven that he was paid.
The second argument is that the crimes reported in Andorra are already being investigated in that country. The appellants argue that “there is no procedural obstacle to the investigation of clearly criminal acts committed by Spanish citizens abroad”.
It is likely that both the room and the Prosecutor’s Office will support the judge, although the latter has opened Catalonia an investigation after the publication by La Vanguardia and ElDiario.es of a list of people investigated without a court order that included the former prosecutor in head of the Martín Rodríguez Sol community.
