The false dossier on Xavier Trias spread in October 2014 through the newspaper El Mundo by the so-called patriotic police was prepared by the head of the French customs in Toulouse, Jean-Michel Pillon, according to the documentation accessed by La Vanguardia and RAC1.
The senior French official – “director of first class customs services, assigned to the position of senior administrator of customs and indirect duties in Toulouse”, confirmed in his position in the summer of 2022 – received the request for information about Trias through a email sent in August 2014, a copy of which accompanies this information, from Commissioner Enrique García Castaño, in which he lets him know that “we continue with the Catalan problem” and “I need to know if our friends [Trias and his brother Juan Maria] They have accounts in Switzerland.”
The assignment evolved and in the end it ended up generating a 31-page report in which the only truth was the name of the politician, some press clippings and few references to property records. The rest, especially the ownership of supposed accounts in Switzerland, with 13 million euros and another two in Spain, were a complete invention.
But the French police officer, in charge of fighting fraud at the most important customs in the south of France, would have earned 25,000 euros in cash from the reserved funds of the Ministry of the Interior.
It was not the only order of that type. It was also invented that Jordi Pujol Ferrusola, the eldest son of former president Jordi Pujol, appeared on the Falciani list, which included the names of thousands of account holders in Switzerland at the HSBC bank. That document ended up in the case against the Pujol family that is being heard in the National Court by Judge Santiago Pedraz.
García Castaño’s French collaborator received at least one more assignment, in this case linked to the Palau case, regarding accounts of its president, Félix Millet, and about people from CDC, the nationalist party, although it is not clear what the result was. In total, the clever French customs official would have pocketed 50,000 euros, according to the sources consulted.
With the dossier in their possession, the Spanish police, without finding out if the data was true, leaked it to the newspaper usually used to leak these false documents, El Mundo. He had already done it before with the dossier on Jordi Pujol about an alleged foundation in Geneva (Switzerland) with hundreds of millions, November 2012; the alleged connection of the then president Artur Mas with Pujol accounts in Liechtenstein, September 2014. On October 28, 2014 he published the non-existent Xavier Trias account at UBS.
The publication of the dossier in the aforementioned Madrid newspaper was accompanied by pressure from senior officials of the Ministry of the Interior on other media outlets to echo the information in their editions of the following day. In these conversations, senior ministerial officials insisted on the veracity of the accusations against the mayor of Barcelona.
Given the firm reaction of the mayor of Barcelona when the information was published, denying the accusations and filing a complaint against its authors, the police tried to obtain more information. García Castaño sent the report to Udef, the unit dedicated to the prosecution of economic crime, and to Sepblac, the body dependent on the Ministry of Economy and the Bank of Spain, which appoints the president, in charge of combating money laundering. None of this worked and Trias himself obtained a quick denial from the Swiss banking entity in which he theoretically owned an account, pointing out in a statement that not even the numbering coincided with the one used.
A report prepared a little more than a month later would end up giving an account of the efforts made. The document, which is also published alongside this information, acknowledges that “When some discrepancies arise regarding the information received [from customs director Pillon], breaking all the security rules self-imposed by the informants, an appointment is considered for the clarification of some extremes and they tell us that the information is absolutely reliable and that Xavier Trias y Vidal de Llobatera has accounts in Switzerland, but that due to the contacts he has in the Swiss country with Josef Ackerman, he is one of the few people who enjoy the “ “privilege” of being able to change the number every five days, which makes it practically impossible for it to be investigated.” Quaint argument to explain that the account was untraceable, but not because of the change in numbering but because it did not exist.
The internal police report, which was sent to the Ministry of the Interior giving explanations, concludes by defending its actions in this dark matter: “This entire investigation, as can be seen from this report, is carried out in all its aspects by the corresponding units of the Corps. National Police without there being any special or secret unit that is dedicated to carrying out any type of investigation outside the Law, as has been suggested by some media, much less about Catalan independence politicians.
