The former president of Barça and businessman, Sandro Rosell, has filed a criminal complaint against several members of the so-called Operation Catalunya, the police corruption plot that fabricated false evidence to combat independence. The brief that was presented yesterday before the National High Court is directed against the former retired Police Commissioner, José Manuel Villarejo; former inspector Antonio Giménez Raso, inspector Alberto Esteve; Marcelino Martín Blas, former head of Internal Affairs; and Marc L. Varri, FBI attache at the US Embassy in Madrid. He accuses all of them of maneuvering to incriminate him in alleged cases of corruption. Some of the fabricated evidence was used during the judicial process for which Rosell spent two years in preventive detention and for which he ended up acquitted.
Rosell’s lawyers, from the Molins office, have decided to take a step forward after several reports appeared in the media indicating that Villarejo and his entourage put Sandro Rosell, as president of Barça, on the black list of people who had to be fought during the years of the rise of the procés. “Some of those responsible for the aforementioned political-police plot apparently considered him linked to the independence movement. This circumstance, together with the undoubted social relevance of FCB, put the plaintiff in the crosshairs of said criminal network,” the complaint underlines.
A recording published by the digital newspaper El Món revealed that the former president of the PP of Catalonia and current senator Alícia Sánchez Camacho had had a conversation with Villarejo in which she showed “great interest in investigating Rosell” noting to the commissioner that her family had founded Convergència Democràtica together with the Pujol and Sumarroca families. Despite recounting this incriminating fact, Rosell’s lawyers leave the decision to charge Sánchez Camacho to the magistrate’s discretion, since this would mean that the case would be referred to the Supreme Court due to the senator’s status as a judge.
Another of the people against whom the complaint is directed is the FBI attaché at the United States embassy in Madrid, Marc L. Varri, whom he attributes to having collaborated with Villarejo in the preparation of several reports to incriminate Rosell in the case. of the Fifagate of alleged corruption in the world of football, which served “as a pretext for the Spanish authorities to investigate the former president of Barça” in relation to matters that had nothing to do with the aforementioned scandal, “they point out.
In addition to several newspaper articles that indicate that the police plot fabricated evidence against Rosell, the complaint also includes Villarejo’s statements in the TV3 program FAQS in which he stated that the magistrate Carmen Lamela, instructor of the case against Rosell and who imprisoned the leaders of the procés, would have agreed to investigate and imprison the former president of Barça in exchange for being promoted to the Supreme Court, as it happened. For all these reasons, Rosell considers that the facts reported may constitute the crimes of criminal organization, false documentation, false accusation and complaint, embezzlement of public funds and illegal detention.
