Sandro Rosell was arrested on May 23, 2017, when the process in Catalonia was advancing towards the moment of maximum tension between the Government of the Generalitat and the State. For a part of public opinion, the cause of his misfortune was a Letter of Request from the US linked to an investigation into a bribery network in the International Football Federation (FIFA), in which the former president of Barça would have participated. For another sector, especially in Catalonia, his arrest was a reprisal for the collaboration of Barça, a club he had chaired, in some of the massive demonstrations of the process.
The complaint that led him to spend almost two years in prison before trial was filed in March 2017, as if it fell from heaven, without precedents. The Letter Rogatory sent in December 2015 by the New York prosecutor’s office was not mentioned at all, despite the fact that this was the element that put the former president of Barça under the magnifying glass of the judge and the prosecutor’s office. But in reality, in the end Rosell had not been accused of anything in Manhattan. The key piece, as was already the norm in those years, was a report from the central economic and fiscal crime unit (UDEF), as convincing as it was finally insolvent.
But neither 2017 nor 2015 were actually the start dates for anything. Anticipating the judicial calendar and the North American Rogatory, Rosell was already the object of interest for some key figures in the so-called Operation Catalonia.
The then president of the PP in this community, Alicia Sánchez Camacho, the commissioner José Manuel Villarejo and the ex-lover of Jordi Pujol Ferrusola, Victoria Ãlvarez.
It is well known that in the fall of 2012 the former dictated to the latter a blacklist of politicians, businessmen and executives, including Rosell, whose lives had to be complicated due to their alleged collusion with the independence movement. He also told him about Ãlvarez, whom the commissioner would make the first denouncer of the Pujol clan.
The next clue is found in the recordings of a peculiar character. A computer scientist named José Luis Pérez, with whom Victoria Ãlvarez came into contact at the end of 2013. The link was the far-right association Manos Limpias, specialized in filing judicial complaints, either for political or economic reasons.
In the end, Ãlvarez got the computer scientist to meet with Villarejo. And here could be a first explanation for Rosell’s problems.
José Luis Pérez would end up sentenced twice for coercion against a Barça manager, although the defense of “psychic alteration” was applied to him, which meant his internment in a psychiatric center for five months. Before the sentence, he had created a blog on the internet that, significantly, he called “Sandro Rosell’s transparency”, from which he dedicated himself to publishing alleged corruptions of Barça managers.
After their first meeting, on January 13, 2014, according to the computer recordings and the police officer’s agenda, the former became a relevant source on Rosell for the latter, regardless of whether the material was truthful or not. Also in those days, the first notes on contacts with Marc Varri, the FBI attaché at the US embassy and a key person, appear in the commissioner’s diary, according to Rosell’s complaint being processed by Madrid court number 13, in the activation of the US Rogatory against him. Varri will be the American coordinator of the Rogatory. A controversial character, according to the sources consulted by this newspaper.
The most relevant thing is that the UDEF report on Rosell, delivered to the prosecution in February 2016, included a good number of references to José Luis Pérez’s blog. It also analyzes companies and links that he had reported to Villarejo before the case was made public. This feeds the idea that the commissioner could place that material to fabricate an ad hoc accusation against Rosell.
The UDEF report, the mainstay of the prosecution’s accusation, would end up littered with references to unreliable websites or blogs, which published mere speculation or rumours. Its content was never verified by the authors of the police document.
So much so, that later most of the claims turned out to be inaccurate, if not outright false. Rosell was attributed assets hidden abroad that did not exist, among other things because he had already taken advantage of Cristóbal Montoro’s tax amnesty in 2012. He assured that he had legal cases open against him in other countries. but they weren’t real. He gave certain accounts of the businessman in New York that were actually based in the United Kingdom.
The UDEF report bears the signature of the chief inspector of group number 111,468, Alberto Estévez, a member of the factory of false or cheat dossiers manufactured by the group controlled by Villarejo and under the supervision of the brigade chief José Luis André, under the tutelage of the commissioner José Luis Olivera.
The prosecutors limited themselves to copying in their writing the rosary of commercial operations and bank transfers included in the police report and turned it into a complaint that in the end would end up being rejected by the courtroom that tried the case.
