On December 2, 2012 it was freezing cold. We were in the middle of a storm, Neucat had been activated and the smartest in the journalistic union was Guillem Sànchez (formerly at ACN, now at El Periódico) who put on thick camel-colored boots, a feather coat, gloves and a hat to face the onslaughts of that icy wind. Others, less farsighted and lovers of improvisation, trust that Converse and a jacket would already serve to combat the cold. (spoiler: they didn’t work). However, the real storm was inside the courts of Sabadell, where the mayor Manuel Bustos declared that he was being investigated for influence peddling.
The day chosen by the judge to summon all the defendants for those events was a Sunday. Sunday in the middle of a cold snap was a very appetizing cocktail for anyone that only got better when we learned that Bustos did not declare first thing in the morning, but at six in the evening. He appeared before the judge for six long hours. The cold was pressing. The scenes were terrifying. The cameramen were shivering, the reporters were walking around breathing in a thick mist to combat the icy temperatures while a group of Bustos stalwarts stood stoically behind some fences to offer him their full support.
They say that in moments of desperation is when the best ideas arise. On the brink of amputating my toes and stalactites falling from my eyelids, I remembered that I had a balloon in the trunk of my car. I took out the ball and the journalists turned that icy wait into a small rondo and gave a recital like good frustrated footballers. The formula worked except for Guillem, who realized that those thick boots did not allow him to show all his talent.
Bustos left at twelve at night. Many of us had been there since ten in the morning. The appearance of the mayor was like crowning Everest. We were coming to the end and we could go to the base camp, that is, to our house. Bustos had been indicted the previous Tuesday, two days after the 2012 Catalan elections, the so-called plebiscites. In a police operation, the Mossos broke into the Sabadell Town Hall, around forty companies and several homes. This is how the Mercurio case began, with the suspicion that some public officials received bribes from construction companies in exchange for the award of public works. From there, the Mossos began to tap phones and found new evidence that accumulated in a total of 35 separate pieces.
Bustos is not in all of them and in the main one, for which he was initially investigated, he was exonerated. However, the cause that caused such a stir and that marked the end of the political career of the mayor of Sabadell is still frozen in court. Bustos has been tried and convicted twice, which meant that he went to prison last year, and he is pending another two trials. The last conviction was for ordering the head of the local police to withdraw two traffic tickets from his ex-wife and, before, for enlisting a friend of hers as a municipal architect of Montcada i Reixach without a public contest. During the trial he claimed that she was the Messi of urban planning in Catalonia and that she deserved special treatment. The judge did not believe it and he was sentenced. In the courts, the only Messi was us in that round that saved us from the cold.
