Can a mosso who performs surveillance tasks for Puigdemont but performs this function without a weapon and without a bulletproof vest be said to be effectively an escort? And if that supposed escort is hired as an adviser, is he failing to fulfill his work or is he simply taking advantage of the freedom of schedules and the lack of control of a position such as that of adviser? That is what the court of the Court of Barcelona must determine after the trial against the ex-minister Miquel Buch and the sergeant of the Mossos and former escort of Puigdemont, Lluís Escolà, has been seen for sentencing.
The Mossos sergeant helped Puigdemont to go to Belgium after the application of 155 and then accompanied him at his own expense and without weapons. That has not been denied. However, the question that the court will have to decide is whether he could do that while he was paid as an adviser to the Department of the Interior. Of the 224 days he was in office, 105 he was with the former president abroad with what the Prosecutor’s Office considers to be a covert contract by former Minister Miquel Buch to provide security for Puigdemont after the Ministry of the Interior had denied protection. For this reason, he requests for Buch a sentence of six years in prison and 27 years of disqualification; and four and a half and 23 disqualification for Escolà.
In the last session of the trial, former Minister Buch stressed that he hired Escolà because he was the best valued for what he needed at that time. “I surround myself with the best,” he stressed. He signed him up, he said, because he needed someone to provide him with small insights on various security matters that were translated into small reports of a few pages. For the Prosecutor’s Office, the brevity of those documents means that Escolà did not work as an adviser and his appointment served to mask that he was Puigdemont’s escort. “They call it reports, but they were notes. I don’t like to read, I like to stay with a series of concepts for the opinions that a Minister of the Interior should give ”, he justified.
During his statement, Buch has denied absolutely everything and has argued that he only knew Escolà for his professional worth. Before hiring him, Buch did not know who Escolà was despite the fact that he had appeared in many media outlets identified as Puigdemont escort; In the Parliament they had asked him about him and even the sergeant himself boasted in the networks of being exercising protection work for the former president. In addition, Buch met Escolà at the former president’s house in Waterloo but has denied having seen him and was also unaware that his adviser traveled continuously to Belgium. “I don’t need to know what his coordinates were. Perhaps someone told me that he was away, but they did not tell me that he was going with President Puigdemont or that he was going with his friends. Everyone in his private life does what he wants ”, Buch stressed. The exalted officials of the Ministry of the Interior in their statement two weeks ago already tried to justify before the court that the advisers lack control and that they roam freely and are only subject to permanent availability but without being subject to a schedule or a specific workplace.
For his part, Escolà clarified that due to his physical condition he could not act as an escort. “They didn’t ask me and I couldn’t have done it. He did not have the tools, nor the team of people, nor my physical conditions to act as an escort ”, he argued. He has acknowledged that on October 29, 2017, he helped Puigdemont flee to Belgium, but he has qualified that he did it after notifying that he was taking a vacation and was not on duty. “Puigdemont tells me if I can accompany him on a private trip. I tell him that it is an honor for me and that I accompany him wherever he needs to”. He has further explained that he accepted a position as a consultant and that he fulfilled that task. “My job was to speak and give my opinion” for which he made “some notes, some diagrams saying how he saw it.”
The prosecutor, Pedro Ariche, has asked the court to sentence Buch and Escolà, considering that they imposed “their own will on the law” by having “allocated funds in order to provide protection for a person who is pending a search warrant and capture and imprisonment.
