Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz determined in a meeting on September 12, 2012, the day after the massive Diada, that fighting Catalan nationalism would become the Interior’s priority and in the following years the Police became a dossier factory. about Catalan politicians who delved not only into their accounts and investments, but also into those of their families. All without judicial control, outside the law and without the need to start from criminal evidence.
Between November 2014 and June 2016, in the records of the Deputy Operational Directorate led by Eugenio Pino, a man of Fernández Díaz’s greatest confidence, accused like him of destroying evidence against the PP in the Kitchen case, there are 34 investigations against leaders Catalans in which their finances and even family relationships were analyzed. Among the politicians investigated in that year and a half were the former presidents Jordi Pujol, Artur Mas and Carles Puigdemont – for his management as mayor of Girona –, the then head of the Mossos, Josep Lluís Trapero; second-rank officials in the Government and even city councilors.
The document comes from police files and is further evidence of the Rajoy Government’s persecution of Catalan politicians collected in a joint investigation by elDiario.es and La Vanguardia. The complete documents of these police units can be consulted at the end of this article.
It was Eugenio Pino, the minister’s right hand man, who channeled the flow of dossiers prepared by different police units: the Department of Internal Affairs, the UDEF (specialized in economic and fiscal crime), the General Information Commission, the Provincial Information Brigade of Barcelona and also the hyperactive commissioner Villarejo. All this material ended up in the minister’s office and the most sensitive information, according to sources involved in the case, was forwarded to the President of the Government, Mariano Rajoy, in sealed envelopes, without sender or recipient, through the escort service.
Everything appears in the GATI file (Police Information Analysis and Processing Group), a database that was named after the group that manages it and is used to avoid duplicate investigations within the Corps. The different units enter identities, license plates or telephone numbers that they are monitoring and if other police officers have done so before, the system notifies of the coincidence so as not to investigate the same thing twice.
In this flow of dossiers, some of them published in related media, the police units warned about all types of movements of nationalist officials and their families.
The first is titled “expansion of the investigation into possession of assets in Switzerland by Xavier Trias” and is dated November 27, 2014, when it was already known that the information published by El Mundo that attributed to the former mayor of Barcelona an account in Switzerland, based on police reports, was fake. On May 19, 2015, a new report was dated along the same lines against Trias: “On urban corruption related to Trias.”
The mayor of Barcelona has always denied the existence of assets outside of Spain and the supposed account that came from a screenshot of a police unit did not even have the number of the bank he cited. Everything was false. There was no more news about the hypothetical urban corruption.
The list includes everything: from a “possible corruption plot related to the Sagrada Familia” to an alleged “irregular financing system of ERC through the former magistrate of the Superior Court of Catalonia Eduard Bajet Royo”, and an investigation is also included. to the then head of the Mossos de Esquadra, Josep Lluis Trapero, whom the police accuse of protecting “the Jorodovich family in their drug trafficking issues.” The last police report that appears in the registry alludes to alleged information from the ex-wife of one of Jordi Pujol’s children, “warning of his possible flight to New Zealand, a country with which there is no extradition treaty.”
Similar rumors appear in up to 34 investigations that the Deputy Directorate of the Police compiles in a document that Fernández Díaz handled in his office.
A concrete example of how they were manufactured. On March 17, 2015, and outside of any procedure, two chief police inspectors – who sign with their badge number – draft a report and send it to the Ministry. In it they point to an alleged commission of 90 million euros that the company Acciona would have paid to Artur Mas in exchange for a contract from the Generalitat for the concession of the Barcelona Water service for 50 years.
The source of this information is the then director of the Anti-Fraud Agency, Daniel de Alfonso, who a few months before had been recorded conspiring with Fernández Díaz to pre-constitute evidence against the independence movement that could be taken to the Prosecutor’s Office to make noise in the newspapers, as he announced. the newspaper Público. The agents transcribe the clues that De Alfonso gave them during a three-hour meeting about the alleged commissions charged by Mas: “The informant tells us that for this operation and contracting, Artur Mas receives an amount of money (he They say that 90 million euros, which, curiously, would represent 3% of the operation) that would be managed by this investment fund that operates in Guernsey, Belize and Barbados, money that would be delivered to the fund by Banco PACTUAL of Brazil ”.
The insinuations about alleged bribes collected by Mas had already been on the minister’s table a few years before. On November 14, 2012, it was the Unit against Economic and Fiscal Crime (Udef) that gave credibility to an anonymous complaint from an alleged repentant, a businessman who said he had paid commissions to the Palau plot in these terms: “Ask the Mr. Artur Mas, surely he knows more than me, especially after selling the management of Barcelona’s drinking water for the next 50 years, for 1,000 million euros. I believe that the person in charge of Acciona went only through Brazilian lands in search of financing, perhaps it was also good for him to leave an account there with a very high commission, in the name of a great person from Catalonia.
Such speculations were collected without evidence or indications in those police reports that gave them credibility. The commission of 30 million to the former Catalan president was never heard of again.
Mas’s was not the only speculation provided by De Alfonso to the police officers. The leader of Antifraud in Catalonia, who had placed himself “under the orders” of Fernández Díaz to attack the independence movement in the meeting that someone recorded without warning him, provides other alleged clues about corruption of Carles Puigdemont during his time as mayor of Girona.
De Alfonso told the inspectors that, when he was in charge of the City Council, Puigdemont bought an art collection for 3.7 million euros with 1,240 works by Picasso, Dalí, Miró, Lorca, Tàpies and Maruja Mallo through the company municipal waters. It was a fact that was known to public opinion. “If it could be proven, it would be criminal,” in any case, the police report transcribes the words of De Alfonso, who also promised to send any relevant documentation to Madrid, so that the police there could work on it, “subtracted from nationalist pressure.” .
The case was judicialized and reached the Supreme Court, the court competent to try Puigdemont, and the investigation was archived, ruling out any crime of corruption. The Supreme Court reduced the case to an administrative irregularity.
Alfonso became famous in the rest of the State months later when the recordings of that meeting in the Ministry’s office emerged where he and Fernández Díaz were looking for dirty laundry from politicians from CiU but also from Esquerra and in which the head of the Interior assured that President Rajoy was aware. “He knows it,” the minister said of Rajoy about these maneuvers against the pro-independence world. He explained in that quote that the president “is a discreet man if there ever was one” and whose “right hand does not know what the left hand is doing.”
Meanwhile, De Alfonso reeled off alleged evidence that he himself considered weak against nationalist politicians. Without knowing that someone was recording the conversation, Fernández Díaz celebrated the information provided by De Alfonso that according to him could do “a lot of harm” to some of those leaders. Warned by the person in charge of Anti-Fraud that he did not have much evidence, Fernández Díaz downplayed the weakness of the accusations with another phrase that forever summarized the way the sewers operate: “The Prosecutor’s Office will refine it for you.” The minister later explained that he had said “The prosecution, anyway.” In the same recorded meeting with De Alfonso, the minister already warned: “I will deny under torture that this meeting existed.”
Source: www.eldiario.es
