All roads lead to Rajoy. After the latest revelations about Operation Catalunya uncovered by elDiario.es and La Vanguardia, many focuses have turned towards the former president of the Government. The sources involved in the case assure that the information obtained outside the law about the independence objectives was forwarded to the president of the PP to the Moncloa in sealed envelopes, without sender or recipient and through the escort service. And that this Operation was not limited to the Ministry of the Interior of the time but to other departments of Mariano Rajoy’s Executive such as the Treasury.
“These are embarrassing and shameful behaviors. It is the PP’s use of the levers of the rule of law to spy on its political adversaries. “It is a very serious issue,” said the spokesperson for Pedro Sánchez’s Government, the socialist Pilar Alegría, in a recent press conference. When asked by the media about the possibility of her party supporting the parliamentary groups’ demand that Rajoy be summoned to appear at the Investigative Committee, Alegría left the door open. “We are going to reach the ultimate consequences, analyzing even the smallest detail. We must not rule out the appearance of any member of the previous PP administration,” she responded.
Although the PSOE has not yet officially confirmed it, many voices in Ferraz and in the socialist parliamentary group assume that the summons of the former president of the Government is “unavoidable” and that no one would understand at this point that Pedro Sánchez’s people would save Rajoy from a commission of inquiry into a scandal that hits him hard. All of Sánchez’s parliamentary allies, in fact, support summoning the former president. And some of them already take his appearance for granted and remind the PSOE that it is a commitment made to get to the bottom of political corruption during the PP governments.
“This time, since the agreements we have are that there will be no crossed vetoes, I am sure that Rajoy will appear in Congress,” recently stated the general secretary of Junts, Jordi Turull, who claimed the “right to know” of the independence movement regarding Operation Catalunya. From ERC, Pere Aragonès also pointed directly to Rajoy and assured that he was not surprised that he “knew the details of the dirty war against the independence movement.”
Sumar also expressed himself along the same lines, who will propose that the former president go to Congress again to account for the scandals of his mandate, as happened in the previous legislature with the Kitchen case. “Rajoy cannot escape this shame that will haunt him throughout his life. He demonstrably allowed false evidence to be fabricated against adversaries and the institutions of this country to be used for a corrupt party,” said Sumar spokesperson Aina Vidal, following the revelations by elDiario.es.
Mariano Rajoy himself publicly referred last week to the Congress investigations, without giving details about the substance of the matter or about his appearance. “The establishment in Congress of three investigative commissions has the objective of seeing if they come up with something, which I already told you is very difficult, and then go to court. It is the key to what is happening,” Rajoy said at a legal forum in Madrid.
That of Operation Catalunya is one of the three investigative commissions agreed between the PSOE and the Catalan independentists within the agreement to invest Pedro Sánchez as president of the Government. In one of the first votes of the legislature, the majority of the Chamber gave the green light in December to the investigations also into the Pegasus case and the 2017 attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils. In the case of the dirty war by the Rajoy Government against political adversaries, it is expected that the constitution of the Commission will take place during the first days of February, once the session period has been reactivated.
In parallel to the parliamentary work, the Catalan Prosecutor’s Office has opened proceedings to investigate the maneuvers of the political brigade in the Governments of Mariano Rajoy against Catalan politicians, parties and officials that the Interior leadership and the PP linked to the independence movement. The public ministry has already requested all the documentation about the dirty war that those police units orchestrated with who was the Superior Prosecutor of Catalonia until 2013, Martín Rodríguez Sol, an exclusive revealed from a joint investigation by elDiario.es and La Vanguardia. This is the first formal investigation into Operation Catalunya.
Immersed in the very complex parliamentary processing of the amnesty law, the PSOE maintains that if this point has been reached it is precisely because of the way in which the PP faced the independence challenge and they defend that the grace measure has the objective of “scarring ” what was broken during the Government of Mariano Rajoy. “As it does not unite with Spain, it is with corruption or with Rajoy’s dirty war,” Pedro Sánchez said last weekend at the Political Convention of his party in A Coruña.
Source: www.eldiario.es
