The government of Mariano Rajoy put the police leadership of the Ministry of the Interior, which was controlled by Jorge Fernández Díaz, at the service of its political maneuvers outside the law, mainly special operations against independence and its political rivals, and also those of cover-up and obstruction of investigations into their corruption cases.
The abundant documentation collected in a joint investigation by La Vanguardia and ElDiario, the publication of which begins today, plus the testimonies of sources involved in the events, indicates that a good part of the reports reached the minister’s desk which then gave rise to several maneuvers to discredit or open court cases against people allegedly linked to independence. According to sources involved in the events, Fernández Díaz sent a large part of those documents, in sealed envelopes and through his escorts, to the then president of the Spanish government.
The new data make it possible to reconstruct to a large extent the functioning of the operation to face the Catalan independence crisis with procedures outside the law and formal police protocols: prospective collection of information on independenceists, real or presumed, using the media of the police forces; preparation of dossiers with mostly false information and in some cases with confidential data provided by the Ministry of Finance, led by Cristóbal Montoro. Despite this, those dossiers were turned into reports that were leaked to the militant press or introduced into court cases with irregular methods, with the aim of stimulating the zeal of judges, prosecutors and extreme right-wing groups that presented complaints to the courts .
For those affairs, the whole of the police leadership ended up being occupied – in addition to the well-known commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, who practiced a triple obedience in these jobs: to the minister; to the general secretary of the PP, María Dolores de Cospedal, and to their own private businesses; to the body’s operational manager, the deputy operational director (DAO), Eugenio Pino, direct interlocutor of the minister; the internal affairs unit; the economic and financial crime unit (UDEF), whose reports, drafts or mere rumors would play a key role; the general information brigade, especially that of Barcelona, ??and now on the sidelines of the ministry, the Antifraud Office of Catalonia, directed by Daniel de Alfonso–, which worked on the compilation of information, without a judicial mandate or specific criminal evidence to act against the image and legal security of the people and institutions considered targets. According to the aforementioned sources, the minister played a prominent role – “you inform me first”, he told those involved – and was aware of all the movements.
To questions from La Vanguardia, Fernández Díaz said he had nothing to say about “an operation about which I know what has been published and which is a name invented by a very well-known personage, apparently”.
From September 2012, right after the first massive Day in the streets of Barcelona, ??when it was decided to launch the operation, the table of the head of Interior became the landing strip for all kinds of notes information and dossiers on the matter. From there they spread through different channels.
In most cases, these were prospective investigations, that is to say, motivated by the predetermined political objective of discovering irregularities, but without evidence, something prohibited in the legislation. In the vast majority of cases, those investigations did not obtain results in the form of the discovery of illegalities – with the great exception of the secret Andorran accounts of the Pujol family, while the rest have been expiring one after the other – , but this did not prevent them from making reports to send them to the related press and try to influence some already open cases.
But despite the seriousness of the many facts already known, neither the Spanish judiciary nor the main political parties have considered it necessary to investigate what happened or purge the affected police bodies. It was a serious attack against the rights and freedoms of citizens in a society that calls itself democratic, using practices of impunity and opacity.
The reports arrived regularly, sometimes weekly, in other periods, fortnightly, and “the minister considered the matter of the utmost interest, he was obsessed with it”, says a person with knowledge of the facts.
What could probably be considered the first written contribution sent to the minister in the form of an information note from Commissioner Villarejo – investigated in a myriad of cases for his allegedly illegal practices, but none related to his activities linked to the persecution policy – ??is precisely dated October 18, 2012.
According to the sources contacted for the preparation of this article, the briefing notes were the idea of ??the then number two in the ministry and trusted man of Fernández Díaz, Francisco Martínez, first as head of his cabinet and since January of 2013 as Secretary of State, to formalize the contributions on the inquiries that until then the commissioner had made orally. From that moment on, the police handed them over and registered them to the Police Directorate, who at the same time sent them to the ministerial manager; he also sent copies directly to the minister through Martínez. In reality, it was a summary of anonymous reports drawn up by UDEF agents after being tasked with setting things up and released to the press on pages without headers or signatures and in which mention was made of alleged illegalities by Catalan nationalist leaders or people close to them.
Among these documents was a series of five on the case of the Palau de la Música that anticipates the story set out in the informational note sent by Villarejo to the direction of the Police and the minister.
That information note, which is reproduced accompanying this information, bears a reference key almost always used by the commissioner, “F/V” and is a good example of how that hidden operation worked, outside of legality and avoiding orthodox police practices when an investigation of this kind was initiated.
It would mark the future pattern of attempts to deal with independence, also against political rivals, as in the case of José Blanco, then secretary of organization of the PSOE and whose name appeared in conversations recorded in the course of ‘a judicial instruction instructed in Galicia. Fernández Díaz ended up having on his desk transcripts of those recordings collected in a judicial summary.
Most of Villarejo’s document summarizes some ongoing legal cases, but his aim was not to review the newspaper library but to give them a new, more explosive life and generate public noise. The description of those judicial instructions included the attribution to the then president of the Generalitat, Artur Mas, of accounts in Liechtenstein. The document ended with a disturbing heading entitled: “Information provided by a reliable source”, in which accounts in Switzerland and Andorra were attributed to Mas, the family of former president Jordi Pujol and the “hard core of CDC”.
The first case analyzed was that of the Palau de la Música de Barcelona, ??which indicates Villarejo’s connection with the initial series mentioned above, in which the financial looting of the musical institution at the hands of its president, Fèlix Millet, was investigated , and its most direct collaborators, and also the participation of the former CDC of Pujol i Mas in the collection of commissions through that institution.
Just eleven days after that report, two high-ranking police officers, José Luis Olivera, director of the Center for Intelligence Against Organized Crime (CICO) and until recently head of the UDEF, and Marcelino Martín Blas, head of the internal affairs unit, went to Barcelona to meet with the prosecutor of the case, Emilio Sánchez Ulled, and ask him to order the search of the headquarters of the political party, a clear attempt to influence the elections that President Mas had called for November 25, 2012.
They did so following an order from Eugenio Pino, deputy operational director of the Police and direct interlocutor of the minister, according to one of the participants. The maneuver was not successful: the prosecutor rejected the pressures and also had the support of the judge in the case, Josep Maria Pijuan, who, by the way, a few months earlier had already dismissed two previous reports from the UDEF, because the considered unlikely. But it would not be the only attempt by the police to condition or direct the evolution of the instruction.
Shortly after, on November 14, since those efforts were unsuccessful, the UDEF sent the judge a letter in which an anonymous complaint was echoed -about the veracity of which there have always been doubts-, in which insisted on the involvement of Mas in the collection of commissions, among other issues, in the awarding of the water company ATLL to Acciona in 2012, a concession that would later be annulled by the courts.
The second case included in that Villarejo report referred to a complaint filed in 1994 and which will be tried next year, that is to say, thirty years later. This is an instruction from court number 5 of Tarragona, focused on the sale of some land and the processing of municipal licenses to the company Eroski, and in which the company Tipel also participated, in which Mas had worked when he was a councilor at Barcelona City Council. The facts of the complaint were subsequent to his time at the company. In any case, Villarejo’s report takes the opportunity to state that hundreds of millions of the old pesetas moved in the sale had gone to “accounts in Liechtenstein in the name of several political leaders, among them AM (Artur Mas) and his father” .
That suggestion was enough to draw up a new fake dossier in which accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein with hundreds of millions of euros were attributed to Pujol and Mas, published, as would end up being usual, in El . This document ended up being dubbed the “draft report” of the UDEF, despite the fact that that unit always denied authorship. Minister Fernández Díaz assured in March 2013, during an appearance in Congress, that the investigation commissioned had ended with an internal affairs report, in which he assured that it was not possible to know where it had come from or who had done When CiU deputy Jordi Jané questioned the minister about whether he knew anything about the draft before it was made public, he replied: “This offends me, the question offends me. It’s like saying I consented or facilitated its publication and that’s an offense. I am asking him to withdraw it”. Despite those explanations to the deputies, the minister was aware of the embryo of that report, Villarejo’s information note.
The last judicial instruction included in that pioneering note was the Campió case, which originated in Lugo and which would lead to the investigation of the concessions of the technical inspections of vehicles (ITV) and lead, first, to the imputation of Oriol Pujol, son of former president Pujol and secretary general of CDC, in March 2013, and his sentence, in July 2018, to two and a half years in prison, for which he had to go to prison.
Did the release of the draft report with the false information about the alleged fake accounts of Pujol and Mas cause any reaction from the people in charge of the Interior? Was the operation launched and the flow of reports of the same magnitude to the Ministry of the Interior paralyzed? Was it resumed or were those responsible punished? The truth is that despite the fiasco on the minister’s table, new documents continued to arrive with the same invoice as the one already mentioned, for many months and with a regular cadence, assure the aforementioned sources involved in the events during that period . What’s more, Villarejo received congratulations, which he himself flaunted, and pointed to his agenda, both from his police chiefs and from the minister’s chief of staff, Francisco Martínez, for the negative electoral impact that the false report had, in his opinion, for the nationalists. The minister continued to act in Congress as if nothing had happened.
The proof is that that irregular behavior was repeated with the preparation of another false report, as late as October 2014, against Xavier Trias, leader of CDCi and then mayor of Barcelona, ??in this case attributing- you have an account in Switzerland. The report included an alleged account number that did not match the numbering of the Swiss entity referred to.
Following the chronology, on October 29 and 30, 2012, two reports were given to the minister, both on the children of ex-president Pujol, in this case Oriol and Josep. The report on the second focused on the analysis of the business career of Pujol’s third son. And he provided the curious fact, then unknown to public opinion, that Josep Pujol had taken advantage of the tax amnesty put in place by Rajoy’s Minister of Finance, Cristóbal Montoro. The fraudsters had precisely until November of that year to take advantage of it, which indeed Josep Pujol did. Where did that information come from, the Treasury or the anti-money laundering service?
The obsession with the external accounts of the Pujols and their environment led to the preparation on November 21, 2012 of an informative note with the “secret” seal in which the ownership of the former president’s eldest son was attributed opaque accounts at HSBC and which would be part of the so-called Falciani list, more than 130,000 secret bank accounts that were stolen by Hervé Falciani, an employee of the British entity and who reached the Spanish tax authorities thanks to France. The information was false.
Oleguer Pujol, who also took advantage of the tax amnesty, although in this case the fact was made public the following February, also through El , to which Minister Fernández explained it again Diaz And Oleguer Pujol was precisely the involuntary protagonist of one of the most surprising judicial events, since he was accused of money laundering in the purchase operation of the Banco Santander branch network. In this case, the driving force behind the investigation was the internal affairs unit of the Police, which attributed to the son of the veteran Catalan politician having laundered 2,000 million euros in the purchase of the Botín bank. In the words of the police, it was “the biggest case of money laundering in the history of Spain”.
This was an operation that was already common at the time among the large banking entities: they got rid of the offices, paying a rent to the buyer and with a repurchase agreement. A kind of leasing in which the new owner hardly put any money in, since he received a credit that was facilitated by the seller himself and that was paid with the rent paid by the latter. Oleguer Pujol was a very minority shareholder in the transaction, 6% for which he had paid 500,000 euros, and was part of the management team.
The Anticorruption Prosecutor’s Office, following the arguments of the internal affairs report, opened the case in July 2014, shortly after ex-president Pujol declared that his family, wife and children, had been the holder of accounts for years hidden in Andorra and, therefore, not declared to the Treasury. Nine years later, last July, judge Santiago Pedraz, head of court number five of the National Court, ordered the provisional suspension of proceedings “because despite the diligence carried out, there is no basis even to appreciate any indication of crime, and those who were supplied were mere suspects, not fit to continue criminal proceedings”.
Another of the information notes sent to the ministry, from July 2014, refers to the accounts of the Pujols in Andorra, the publication of which in El Mundo triggered the public statement of the family patriarch. There, its author informs the official receivers that “this information was obtained in a forced and forced manner by the circumstances, they would have been provided by the same officials of the BPA, who in view of the fear of losing their license to practice in Spain as to private banking through the Banca Madrid brand, have chosen to agree to offer collaboration with the Spanish judicial or fiscal authorities”.
