The Prosecutor’s Office of the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) yesterday opened its first investigation into Operation Catalunya following the revelations recently provided by La Vanguardia and ElDiario.es. In a decree, the chief prosecutor of Catalonia, Francisco Bañeras, opens proceedings to clarify whether the Ministry of the Interior led by Jorge Fernández Díaz ordered to investigate in 2012 the then chief prosecutor of Catalonia, Martín Rodríguez Sol, with the apparent aim of seeking incriminating evidence against him.
These are the first inquiries opened by the Prosecutor’s Office about the Catalonia operation, the operation devised by the Interior during the time of Mariano Rajoy to act against personalities, the majority, close to nationalism, in order to try to deactivate what later ‘I would call the process , with methods apparently outside the law.
The Prosecutor’s Office, which has the approval of the State Attorney General, Álvaro García, agrees to “obtain” from La Vanguardia and ElDiario.es the documents on which these media have based their investigation in relation to the case and “any other documents that they have and that are related to the facts that are the subject of this investigation”.
In essence, it is a supposed report from the internal affairs unit of the Police that arrived at the Ministry of the Interior sent by the operational deputy directorate, led by Eugenio Pino, and which proposed to investigate “based on information received ”, among other people from Catalan society, the mentioned ex-chief prosecutor or the entrepreneur Sol Daurella, president and main shareholder of the Coca-Cola bottler.
The prosecutor’s decree quotes headlines and entire sentences from the information published on January 16 to conclude that the facts related, if proven, “could constitute a crime against privacy committed by a public official, and in his case, of a crime of administrative fraud, as well as official document falsification”, without prejudice to other crimes that “could be related to the facts described” or “others that could emerge during the investigation”.
The Prosecutor’s Office draws attention to the document that accompanies the information “allegedly official in appearance with the letterhead of the internal affairs unit of the general direction of the National Police Force” and which does not bear the signature of a chief internal affairs nor date.
The decree also highlights that this investigation “of a pre-trial nature” was never brought to the attention of any judicial body or the prosecutor’s office, despite the fact that the agents in charge “were legally obliged to do so”. Finally, the prosecutor’s decree instructs the general commissioner of the judicial police to “make the appropriate findings” in order to determine the veracity of the document and to indicate “the date of issue”, as well as “the identification” of the officials who could have drafted it. In addition, the public ministry requires that if the existence of the document is proven, it is informed about the police actions it would have given rise to, about the police authority that directed these inquiries and the identity of the officials or authorities to whom the results of the eventual investigation were communicated.
Rodríguez Sol, from the conservative sector, was appointed senior prosecutor in July 2012 and submitted his resignation in March 2013. During his short period at the head of the public ministry, he had two significant clashes with the Spanish government. The first, when he opened proceedings against the newspaper El Mundo for the publication, on November 17, 2012, when there was a week left for the Catalan elections, of a false report on the accounts of Jordi Pujol and Artur Mas in Switzerland and Liechtenstein . The Spanish government did not like this action against an operation that was actually instigated by itself. The second shock was a few months later, when he was in favor of finding a formula that would allow citizens to be consulted. In a climate of media pressure in Madrid in favor of his dismissal, the State Attorney General, Eduardo Torres-Dulce, immediately announced that he was opening a case of impeachment. Rodríguez Sol anticipated and submitted his resignation.
In the supposed report of the internal affairs unit that was released last week, it was explained that the investigation was looking for links between the prosecutor and Unió Democràtica de Catalunya (UDC) and the commissions managed by the lawyers of this party. Rodríguez Sol would end up running for the UDC candidacy in the 2015 Catalan elections.
The new spokeswoman for the federal executive of the PSOE, Esther Peña, yesterday celebrated the opening of these proceedings and urged to reach “to the end” in the judicial and political plagiarism of the Catalonia operation without ruling out the possibility of citing, to the congressional investigation commission, the former president of the Spanish government, Mariano Rajoy. “The commission has not been set up, I cannot tell you if Rajoy will be on the list of witnesses, but the intention is that no one is left out if they can contribute something to clarify the facts and those responsible”, he declared in his first press conference in Ferraz as spokesperson, after the meeting of the new federal executive.
Also linked to the Catalonia operation, the judge of the National Court Manuel García-Castellón rejected yesterday, two years after the request, the personation of Jordi Pujol Ferrusola, son of the former president, as injured in one of the pieces of the Villarejo case – the alleged attempt to blackmail the Andorran bank BPA to find account numbers of the Pujol family -, since the facts he denounces, alleged criminal activities carried out in Andorra by Spanish citizens against him, are already being investigated by the courts of this country The magistrate relies on this argument to refuse to investigate the Catalonia operation as part of the Villarejo case.
