The November 2012 conversation between the president of the Catalan PP, Alicia Sánchez-Camacho, and the police commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, one of the founding moments of the Catalonia operation, is well known. But its full analysis, including the undisclosed content, analyzed by La Vanguardia and Cronicalibre.com, sheds a new light to better understand the illegal operation organized by senior officials of the PP and the Ministry of the Interior, to tackle the Catalan political crisis.
First, the chosen targets: politicians, businessmen and the media. In this last section, La Vanguardia occupied a special and prominent place, to which both referred harshly and contemptuously and to which they intended to put pressure to condition and influence. Also about the clan struggles in the PP and the attempt by a sector of the police, embodied in Villarejo, to gain pre-eminence over the information services, the National Intelligence Center (CNI).
In this first meeting it became clear that the link between the two was the then General Secretary of the PP and later Defense Minister, María Dolores de Cospedal, not charged in any of the cases linked to Villarejo.
Both made their obedience to Cospedal explicit. “The fact that I am here is that María Dolores trusts you to death,” the commissioner started. Sánchez-Camacho replied with equal or more forcefulness: “Me too. María Dolores is as if she were my sister ”. In this way, they confirmed what was recorded in other recordings and what was noted in the police officer’s agenda, which is Cospedal who puts them in contact.
Villarejo finished off his credentials by talking about his relationship, “for 30 years” with Ignacio López del Hierro, a disturbing businessman and intermediary who also plays a prominent role in the police network. And he assured himself that he “has been working for the party all his life.”
Finally, he closed the procession by finishing off that he was “close to Juan Cotino”, general director of the Police in the Government of José María Aznar and that, according to this newspaper, he was the one who recommended the Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz, to resort to Villarejo services.
The two conspirators analyzed who would be part of their circle of trust. And of course, Sánchez-Camacho ruled out from the beginning having the minister, Fernández Díaz, for the relevant information, despite the fact that it will be in his ministry where many of the most relevant events of the Catalonia operation take place. “Does Jorge know this?” He asked Villarejo to add, “I don’t know if I just trusted Jorge (…) I think he has a certain collusion with the Pujol family.” He also recounts that he recently ran into the minister on a train to Madrid, and that he did not know how to answer what he had gone to do in Barcelona, ??but later learned that he had made a lightning visit “to the Pujol father’s foundation.” . “It’s very strange and it gives me…”, whispers Sánchez-Camacho. Throughout the conversation, the head of the Catalan PP insisted several times that the minister is not clean wheat and that he passes information to the convergents. Villarejo agrees not to inform him of her contacts, something that he obviously will not do, in view of the commissioner’s recordings and his entries in the diary.
Villarejo added to the list of fifth columnists his black beasts, the alleged rival of his friend Cospedal, the vice president of the government of Mariano Rajoy, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, and above all the National Intelligence Center (CNI), dependent on her and in the one that the policeman was most interested in penetrating, which he was unable to do thanks to the radical opposition of his manager, General Félix Sanz Roldán. That obsession would end up being one of the keys to Villarejo’s downfall.
The policeman reasoned that “We have people inside [the independence movement]. Today, oddly enough, we are not listening to it. I say that this is stupid on the part of your little friend [Sáenz de Santamaría] who is in charge of the CNI and you think that this is a ten-step rule of the game and here is someone who after five steps turns and shoots you in the the neck”.
Back to November 6, 2012, three days before the start of the 25-N electoral campaign in Catalonia. And the objective is made explicit: “Until the 25th we have to ensure that these scoundrels do not get an absolute majority, but then there is a whole war left and it is essential for the party to have people like you,” says the commissioner. “Fundamental for Spain”, she stresses. Influence public opinion, affect the electoral result.
The commissioner makes Sánchez-Camacho the savior of Catalonia, a key piece in obtaining essential information for the operation they are starting.
Villarejo unambiguously describes what the plan that he has been partly entrusted to consists of and that he complements with his money-making style: obtaining “nuclear” information – preferably “personal issues, not even party financing” – and leaking it to the press. He lists media and journalists awaiting the order.
Everything will be done without the involvement of politicians at all, “so as not to burn” the PP. Villarejo and his team take care of it. “I have already told María Dolores that she should not give that type of nuclear information to journalists under any circumstances, ever, ever.” “The advantage,” he says at another time, “is that no one controls us, no one knows that we exist and no one has any idea, nor should they know anything.”
And in the end, the two of them together, they draw up a list of characters for whom life must be made impossible, search for compromising information or, as will end up happening, fabricate false dossiers or half-truths to disqualify them from public opinion or open legal proceedings against them. no actual basis.
Villarejo emphasizes several times that his first objective is the Pujol family, since the president of the Generalitat at that time, Artur Mas, is a “sycophant”. “What interests us is to focus all our attention on the Pujols, especially Oriol,” he says.
The two agree that Josep Antoni Duran i Lleida, the former leader of the Unió Democràtica de Catalunya (UDC), a party then in coalition with the Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (CDC) and which dissolved three years later, is “a double agent”. “You have to dismantle him, he’s a key guy,” he says. “You have to oust him and send him into exile,” she settles.
Due to their proximity to the Pujols, Sánchez-Camacho puts the Sumarroca family, owner of the Emte construction company, and Sandro Rosell, the businessman and president of Barça, on the list. Some time later, a member of the first family and the president of Barça would end up in custody, in the case of the second for two years. Sánchez-Camacho also asked to investigate Jaume Giró, then general director of the La Caixa Foundation. “Now it has become totally independentist,” he says.
The commissioner even offered to put pressure on the then general director of La Caixa, Juan María Nin, taking advantage of his disagreements with the president of the bank and the foundation that owns the former, Isidre Fainé. She warned Villarejo against Narciso Ortega, former superior police chief of Catalonia , dismissed by Fernández Díaz, whom he assures is “close to Felip Puig”, then Minister of the Interior. According to Sánchez-Camacho, Ortega cannot return to Catalonia.
Villarejo shares with Sánchez-Camacho the information that his team has. Alleged accounts in Andorra, for example. He tells her that he has been going to the Principality a lot. “We are there paying bankers. We are in the BPA ”, he assures.
Villarejo left that meeting with two special names noted on his agenda: that of the multi-convict Javier de la Rosa and that of an ex-girlfriend of Jordi Pujol Ferrusola, Victoria Álvarez. The two characters will become the two visible sources of the Catalonia operation, the ones that will file a complaint and will serve for the first journalistic revelations. De la Rosa told me that he “has documentation from the Pujol family and wanted to give it to someone safe and who needed money,” says Sánchez-Camacho.
