The Government of Mariano Rajoy put the police leadership of the Ministry of the Interior, led by Jorge Fernández Díaz, at the service of its political maneuvers outside the law, mainly special operations against the independence movement and its political rivals, as well as cover-up and obstruction of investigations into his corruption cases.
The abundant documentation compiled in a joint investigation by La Vanguardia and eldiario.es, whose publication begins today, plus the testimonies of sources involved in the events, indicate that a good part of the reports that later gave rise to the minister’s desk arrived. various maneuvers to discredit or open legal cases against people supposedly linked to the independence movement. According to sources involved in the events, Fernández Díaz sent a good part of these documents, in sealed envelopes and through his bodyguards, to the President of the Government.
The new data make it possible to reconstruct to a large extent the functioning of the operation to confront the Catalan independence crisis with procedures outside the law and formal police protocols: prospective collection of information on real or suspected independentists, using the media of the police forces; preparation of dossiers with mostly false information and in some cases with confidential data provided by the Ministry of Finance, headed by Cristóbal Montoro; Despite this, these dossiers became reports that were leaked to the militant press and/or were introduced into judicial cases with irregular methods, in order to stimulate the zeal of judges, prosecutors and extreme right groups that filed complaints in court. .
When asked by La Vanguardia, Fernández Díaz claims to have nothing to say regarding “an operation that I know has been published and which is a name that a very well-known character has apparently invented.”
Since September 2012, just after the first massive Diada in the streets of Barcelona when it was decided to launch the operation, the Interior Minister’s desk became the landing strip for all kinds of informative notes and dossiers on the matter. . From there they spread through different routes.
In most cases, these were prospective investigations, that is, motivated by the predetermined political objective of discovering irregularities, but without evidence, something prohibited by law. In the vast majority of cases, these investigations did not obtain results in the form of the discovery of illegalities – with the great exception of the secret Andorran accounts of the Pujol family, while the rest have been declining one after another – but that did not prevent also prepare reports for submission to the related press and try to influence some cases already open.
But despite the seriousness of the many facts already known, neither the Spanish justice system nor the main political parties have considered it necessary to investigate what happened or purge the affected police agencies. It was a serious attack on the rights and freedoms of citizens in a society that calls itself democratic, using practices of impunity and opacity.
The reports arrived regularly, sometimes weekly, at other times biweekly, and “the minister considered the matter of utmost interest, he was obsessed with it,” asserts a person with knowledge of the facts.
What could probably be considered the first written contribution sent to the minister in the format of an Information Note from Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo – investigated in countless cases for his allegedly illegal practices, but in none related to his activities linked to political persecution – has precisely date of October 18, 2012.
According to the sources contacted for the preparation of this article, the briefing notes were the idea of ??the then number two in the ministry and Fernández Díaz’s trusted man, Francisco Martínez, first as head of his cabinet and since January 2013 as Secretary of State, to formalize the contributions about his investigations that until then the commissioner had made orally. From that moment on, the police officer delivered them and registered them at the police headquarters, which in turn sent them to the ministerial person in charge; He also sent copies directly to the minister through Martínez. In reality, it was a summary of anonymous reports prepared by Udef agents after receiving the order to get going and which were sent to the press on pages without letterhead or signature and in which mention was made of alleged illegalities by nationalist leaders. Catalans or people around them.
Among these documents was a series of five on the Palau de la Música case that anticipates the story specified in the Information Note sent by Villarejo to the Police management and the minister.
This informative note, which is reproduced accompanying this information, carries a reference code almost always used by the commissioner, “F/V” and constitutes a good example of how this hidden operation worked, outside the law and circumventing police practices. orthodox when an investigation of that kind was initiated.
It would set the future tone for attacks to confront the independence movement, also against political rivals, as in the case of José Blanco, then organizational secretary of the PSOE and whose name came up in conversations recorded during a judicial investigation carried out in Galicia. . Fernández Díaz ended up having transcripts of those recordings collected in a judicial summary on his table.
Most of Villarejo’s document summarizes some ongoing legal cases, but its objective was not to review the newspaper archive but to give them new, more explosive life and generate public noise. The description of these judicial instructions included the attribution to the then president of the Generalitat, Artur Mas, of accounts in Liechtenstein. The document ended with a disturbing heading titled: “Information provided by a reliable source” in which accounts in Switzerland and Andorra were attributed to Mas, the family of former president Jordi Pujol and the “CDC hard core.”
The first case analyzed was that of the Palau de la Música in Barcelona, ??which indicates Villarejo’s connection with the initial series mentioned above, in which the economic looting of the musical institution at the hands of its president, Felix Millet and its most direct collaborators, as well as the participation of the former CDC of Pujol y Mas in the collection of commissions through that institution.
Just eleven days after that report, two senior police officials, José Luis Olivera, director of the Intelligence Center against Organized Crime (CICO) and until shortly before responsible for the UDEF, and Marcelino Martín Blas, head of the Internal Affairs Unit, went to Barcelona to meet with the prosecutor in the case, Emilio Sánchez Ulled, and ask him to order the search of the political party headquarters, a clear attempt to influence the elections that President Mas had called for November 25, 2012.
They did so following an order from Eugenio Pino, Deputy Operational Director of the Police, and direct interlocutor of the minister, according to one of the participants. The maneuver did not work: the prosecutor rejected the pressure and also had the support of the judge in the case, Josep Maria Pijuan, who, by the way, a few months before had already discarded two previous reports from the UDEF, considering them implausible. But it would not be the only police attempt to condition or direct the evolution of instruction.
Shortly after, on November 14, in view of the fruitlessness of these efforts, the UDEF sent the judge a letter in which it echoed an anonymous complaint – about whose veracity there have always been doubts –, insisting on the involvement of More in the collection of commissions, among other issues in the awarding of the water company ATLL to Acciona in 2012, a concession that would later be annulled by the courts.
The second case included in that Villarejo report referred to a complaint filed in 1994 and that will be judged next year, that is, thirty years later. This is an instruction from court number 5 of Tarragona, focused on the sale of some land and the processing of municipal licenses to the Eroski company and in which the Tipel company also participated, in which Mas had worked when he was a councilor in Barcelona City Council. The facts of the complaint were after his time at the company. In any case, Villarejo’s report takes the opportunity to affirm that hundreds of millions of old pesetas moved in the sale had gone to “accounts in Liechtenstein in the name of several political leaders, including AM (Artur Mas) and his father.”
That suggestion was enough to prepare a new false dossier in which Pujol and Mas were attributed accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein with hundreds of millions of euros, published, as would become customary, in El Mundo. This document ended up being baptized as the “draft report” of the UDEF, despite the fact that this unit always denied its authorship. Minister Fernández Díaz assured in March 2013, during an appearance in Congress, that the investigation commissioned had concluded with an internal affairs report, ensuring that it was not possible to know where it had come from or who had done it. When CiU deputy Jordi Jané questioned the minister about whether he knew about the draft before it was public, he responded: “That offends me, the question offends me. It is like saying that I consented or encouraged its publication and that is an offense. “I beg you to withdraw it.” Despite these explanations to the deputies, the minister knew the embryo of that report, Villarejo’s Information Note.
The last judicial instruction included in that pioneering note was the Campeón case, originating in Lugo and which would lead to the investigation of the concessions of the Technical Vehicle Inspections (ITV) and which would lead, first, to the indictment of Oriol Pujol, son of former president Pujol and general secretary of the CDC, in March 2013 and in his sentence, in July 2018 to two and a half years in prison, for which he had to go to prison.
Did the disclosure of the draft report with the false information about the supposed false accounts of Pujol and Mas provoke any reaction from those responsible for the Interior? Has the operation launched and the flow of reports of the same magnitude in the Ministry of the Interior been paralyzed? Were those responsible reprimanded or sanctioned? The truth is that despite the fiasco, new documents with the same invoice as the one already mentioned continued to arrive at the minister’s table for many months and with a regular cadence, say the aforementioned sources involved in the events during that period. Furthermore, Villarejo received congratulations, which he himself displayed and noted in his agenda, from both his police chiefs and the minister’s chief of staff, Francisco Martínez, for the negative electoral impact that the false report had in his opinion for The nationalists. The minister continued acting in Congress as if nothing had happened.
The proof is that this irregular behavior was repeated with the preparation of another false report, as late as October 2014, against Xavier Trias, CDC leader and then mayor of Barcelona, ??in this case attributing to him the ownership of an account in Switzerland. . The report included an alleged account number that did not match the numbering of the Swiss entity to which it referred.
Following the chronology, on October 29 and 30, 2012, two reports were delivered to the minister, both about the children of former president Pujol, in this case Oriol and Josep. The report on the second focused on the analysis of the business career of Pujol’s third son. And it provided the curious fact, then unknown to public opinion, that Josep Pujol had taken advantage of the tax amnesty launched by Rajoy’s Finance Minister, Cristóbal Montoro. The fraudsters had until November of that year to take refuge, which Josep Pujol actually did. Where did this information come from, from the treasury or the Anti-Money Laundering Service?
The obsession with the foreign accounts of the Pujols and their entourage led to the preparation on November 21, 2012 of an “information note” with the seal of “secret” in which the ownership of opaque accounts was attributed to the eldest son of the former president. at HSBC and which would be part of the so-called Falciani list, more than 130,000 secret bank accounts that were stolen by Hervé Falciani, an employee of the British entity and which reached the Spanish tax authorities thanks to France. The information was false.
The person who also took advantage of the tax amnesty was Oleguer Pujol, although in this case the fact became known the following February, also through El Mundo, to whom Minister Fernández Díaz explained it again. And Oleguer was precisely the involuntary protagonist of another one of the most grotesque judicial incidents, when he was accused of money laundering in the purchase operation of the Banco Santander branch network. In this case, the promoter of the investigation was the Internal Affairs Unit of the police, which attributed the scion of the veteran Catalan politician to having laundered 2,000 million euros in the purchase from the Botín bank. In the words of the police, it was “the largest case of money laundering in the history of Spain.”
It was an operation that was already common at that time among large banking entities: they got rid of the offices, paying rent to the buyer and with a repurchase agreement. A type of leasing in which the new owner hardly put any money, since he received a loan provided by the same seller and which was paid with the rent paid by the latter. Oleguer Pujol was a very minority shareholder in the transaction, 6% for which he had paid 500,000 euros and was part of the management team.
The anti-corruption Prosecutor’s Office, following the arguments of the internal affairs report, opened the case in July 2014, shortly after former president Pujol declared that his family, wife and children had been holders of hidden accounts in Andorra for years and therefore not declared to the public. Tax authorities. Nine years later, last July, Judge Santiago Pedraz, head of court number five of the National Court, issued the provisional dismissal of the proceedings “because despite the procedures carried out there is no basis to even appreciate evidence of any crime, and those that were supplied were mere suspicions, not suitable to follow a criminal procedure.”
Another of the information notes sent to the ministry, from July 2014, refers to the Pujols’ accounts in Andorra, whose publication in El Mundo triggered the public declaration of the family patriarch. In it, its author informs the official recipients that “this information was obtained” in a forced and obligatory manner due to the circumstances, it would have been provided by those responsible for the BPA, who, fearing the possibility of losing the license to practice in Spain as private banking through the Banca Madrid brand, have chosen to accept collaboration with the Spanish judicial and/or tax authorities.”
