On Friday, January 19, Albert Carrillo, lawyer for Jordi Pujol Ferrusola, the eldest son of the former president of the Generalitat, received a very unusual call from court number 6 of the National Court, which is headed by the questioned magistrate Manuel García- Castellon
Pujol Ferrusola’s lawyer had requested four years earlier, in February 2020, that his client be named as the injured party in the so-called Tandem case, the macro-cause originating from the investigation against commissioner José Manuel Villarejo. A year after that first date, he had to remind the judge that he had not deigned to answer the initial request. He finally did, in October 2021, and rejected the personation, which motivated Carrillo to file an appeal in November 2021 before the same judge. So, on that Friday when he received the call from the court, he had been waiting for a response to this appeal for more than two years.
On the other end of the phone, a court official was interested in confirming that she had all the documents related to the case.
On Monday, the judge confirmed that he was rejecting it. Accompanying the interlocutory hearing, the attorney for the administration of justice resolved the issue by pointing out that the appeal “had been involuntarily postponed due to the huge volume of communications received daily for each part of this procedure”. A new example of that disgruntled arrogance that is considered the result of a presumed judicial independence.
And it may seem miraculous that the magistrate would have been able to sign the rejection letter these frantic days in which he is playing a game of chess with Congress on the occasion of the negotiations for the approval in Congress of the new Amnesty law , of which García-Castellón makes a precise follow-up in order to be able to invalidate the effects of the pacts with resolutions in which extensions of the crimes excluded from the pacts between the PSOE and the pro-independence forces emerge systematically.
García Castellón was already controversial before the current conflict in which he has been involved due to the amnesty in the Democratic Tsunami and CDR cases.
Two more of those instructions directed by the judge have been particularly questioned, in one case by the Prosecutor’s Office, in another, by broad sectors of public opinion. In addition to one against the former leader of Podem Pablo Iglesias, the so-called Dina case, which finally had to be filed.
The first, already closed, refers to the Kitchen case, the PP corruption cover-up operation revealed in the Gürtel case, organized from the top of the Ministry of the Interior during the mandate of Mariano Rajoy.
The defenders of the magistrate argue that the instruction of the Kitchen case, in which fifteen years in prison are requested for the Minister of the Interior of the first government of Mariano Rajoy, Jorge Fernández Díaz and a few also for his second, Francisco Martínez , is proof of his independence from the PP.
Nevertheless, that instruction, like that of two other cases linked to the PP, Púnica and Lezo, were already open when the judge arrived at court number 6 of the National Court. In 2000 García-Castellón was appointed by the government of José María Aznar as liaison judge to France, a position he subsequently held in Italy, in total a long period during which, according to critics, he spent more time in Madrid than in Paris or Rome. In 2017 he returned to the Court and at that time all those cases on PP corruption were already open and underway.
And the magistrate adopted when he returned a series of decisions that, although endorsed by the Courtroom, have been the cause of a lively controversy that is still ongoing. In addition to dismissing the cases against dozens of defendants, most of them PP charges, García-Castellón closed the Kitchen case at the beginning of the summer, in a “surprising way, as he wrote in the letter of opposition of the Prosecutor’s Office”, on July 29, 2021, as it left out the former general secretary of the PP, former president of Castilla-La Mancha and former minister of Defence, Maria Dolores de Cospedal. The Prosecutor’s Office responded with unusual harshness to that decision.
There is the circumstance that a few days ago the courtroom forced the magistrate to reopen a case linked to Kitchen against Francisco Martínez using as the main indication his mention on eight occasions in the agenda of commissioner Villarejo.
In a count carried out by La Vanguardia and published on July 12 of last year, in those agendas Cospedal and her closest environment appear referenced in 261 contacts (meetings, calls or messages) with her or her inner circle . The majority, 204, are with López del Hierro [Cospedal’s husband], whom he identifies as ILH. There are 28 direct contacts with Cospedal (MD, MDC or Cospe in the annotations), although there were actually more, as there are recordings of conversations without a clue in the diaries. There are 29 more contacts with his chief of staff, José Luis Ortiz (JL Ortiz), to whom the general secretary of the PP delegated, among other things, payments to the commissioner”.
In short, those who question García-Castellón’s instructions attribute to him having limited them with great zeal to avoid major harm to the conservative party, a kind of damage control accepting the impossibility of completely filing the causes.
In the Kitchen case, there is the paradox that none of the finally accused – Jorge Fernández Díaz, Francisco Martínez and the policemen who complete the list – were officials of the PP of Rajoy and Cospedal, despite the fact that they were the main beneficiaries of the operations of ‘concealment and obstruction.
The second particularly strange instruction is that of the Tandem case, which includes almost all the documentation linked to Operation Catalunya. The magistrate has opposed all the attempts that have been made to open cases linked to this operation. In this case with the support of the Prosecutor’s Office.
The magistrate maintains that he only investigates Villarejo when he acts “on behalf of private clients and in exchange for a price (…) when information obtained in the police field is used”, that is to say taking advantage of his status as a public official to profit Argument that is not the case in the Kitchen case itself, in which this condition is not met. In retrospect, and suddenly, that argument validates all the actions that Villarejo and the members of his group carried out as police officers against all the victims of Operation Catalunya.
Some of those affected have already attended his court, from the Pujols, to the Sumarroca family or Sandro Rosell. He has also rejected documentary and audio evidence provided by businessman Javier Pérez Dolset. Also, the magistrate keeps secret a large number of documents in the case, because “they affect State institutions or the very security of the State”. Once again with the agreement of the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office, although it remains to be seen what happens after the decision of the Catalan prosecutor’s office to investigate the possible illegal investigation into the former chief prosecutor of that community, revealed by a joint investigation by La Vanguardia and ElDiario.es on the 16th. If successful, operation Catalonia could be a new reason for conflict between the public prosecution and the controversial magistrate of court number 6 of the Audiencia.
