The Ministry of the Interior decided this Monday to cancel the Catalan Security Board, scheduled for next Monday, March 25. One week before the meeting – and when the matters that were going to be agreed upon were advanced – the department headed by Fernando Grande-Marlaska has postponed the Security Board, hiding behind the fact that it is not “timely” due to the cycle opened by the electoral advance. According to the Interior, the meeting will take place after the government that emerges from the polls on May 12 is formed. With a stroke of a pen, the ministry has also annulled the Security Board in the Basque Country this Friday. Four days before its celebration.
Sources close to the Interior see this last-minute movement as an electoral move. At a time when PSOE and ERC are fighting for leadership at the polls, the agreements that were scheduled to be signed in a week could be seen by the electorate as a victory for President Pere Aragonès. In fact, the same sources do not hide their desire that the next Security Board to be held be chaired by Salvador Illa.
After the meeting held between Marlaska and the minister of the sector, Joan Ignasi Elena, on January 9 – in which it was agreed to hold the Security Board this quarter –, the teams from both departments have worked with total discretion on the issues. that would be taken to the Security Board. They feared that the leak of some matter related to the expansion of the Mossos d’Esquadra staff, financial transfers to the regional police or increase in powers could inflame the unions of the National Police and the Civil Guard, in constant war against the Minister of the Interior.
In that meeting at the beginning of the year in Madrid, Marlaska and Elena – who exhibited harmony and consensus even with agreed statements on the content of the meeting – stated “the good degree of compliance” of the agreements adopted in the last Security Board of Catalonia , held in November 2021. As the most notable point of that agenda, it was agreed to expand the Mossos staff by 3,739 troops, 20% of the strength at that time of 18,267 agents. The progressive increase was agreed upon, so that at the end of the process, in 2040, the workforce will be made up of 22,006 police officers.
At the 2021 Meeting, it was also agreed to promote the necessary procedures for the Mossos to be considered agents of a Member State in the European Union, so that they can carry out cross-border surveillance tasks.
