There were no surprises and the current officials of the Department of the Interior of the Generalitat yesterday chose chief commissioner Eduard Sallent for the position of new major of the Mossos d’Esquadra. They did it when there were only four hours left until the official end of the campaign for the parliamentary elections and when tomorrow’s result is likely to force a change in the political direction of the department in charge of public security in Catalonia. In any case, the team led by councilor Joan Ignasi Elena has ignored the calendar and at eight o’clock yesterday evening announced that commissioner Sallent is the “most optimal” candidate to ascend to the highest professional category of the police.
The appointment, however, will have to wait. Eduard Sallent will now go to the Public Security Institute of Catalonia, where he will receive a course that will end with a training trip, in this case to a city in northern Europe that he had already selected weeks ago. It will be once this training period is over when the director general of the police who is in charge at that time will appoint the second major of the Mossos.
The news, not as expected and predicted, caused conflicting feelings. It is clear that the commands close to the current chief commissioner must have congratulated him in private. An hour after the official announcement, silence reigned in the Whatsapp group of the commissioners of the Mossos d’Esquadra.
Only two commissioners appeared in the competition to fill this position, Eduard Sallent and Alícia Moriana, currently in charge of the central police region of the Mossos, who surprised many people by taking the step forward despite knowing that she had no chance of being elected . Not even the feminization of the police, which in recent years has been used as an internal flag to reserve places in the promotion of almost all categories, has not played in favor of the rejected aspirant. Nor have they taken into account the higher number of commissioner qualifications.
In any case, the general director of the Police, Pere Ferrer, drew up a report yesterday afternoon, in four hours, in which he defended the option of Eduard Sallent, a report in which he had to point out the reasons why the current chief commissioner of the Mossos has turned out to be the most suitable to take on this professional category.
Alicia Moriana found out from the media that she had not been chosen. No one phoned him beforehand to inform him of the decision. In the early hours of the morning, the commissioner had gone to a court to present an appeal against the basis of the competition to request the judge to provisionally stop the selection process in order to guarantee its legitimacy. The judge accepted Moriana’s appeal, but did not stop the competition.
With the one presented by the commissioner, there are three appeals that are in the courts against the selection process of the second major of the Mossos, a category currently only held by Josep Lluís Trapero. The unions SAP-Fepol and Uspac presented theirs, and warned that the contest was nothing more than “a tailor-made suit” designed for Sallent. In fact, after those appeals, Interior announced that an interview would be held with the two candidates that was not foreseen in the basis of the call and that they announced voluntarily, although it was later assured that it would serve because the candidates defend their candidacies.
Sallent was elected head of the Mossos after Interior sacked his predecessor, Josep Maria Estela.
