Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez and the main leaders of Junts and ERC defended on Monday the need to investigate whether former Prime Minister Mariano Rajoy knew in real time, and protected, the police activities against the Catalan independence movement promoted by former minister Jorge Fernández Díaz between 2012 and 2016. These activities, without judicial protection, consisted of the fabrication of reports that were leaked to certain media outlets where very serious accusations of corruption, most of them false, were made against Catalan independence leaders. Some of these operations were prosecuted by the police themselves or by the Ministry of the Interior, but most of them ended in nothing because the judges decided to shelve them because the evidence used was false.
These illegal manoeuvres against the Catalan independence movement, proven in numerous proceedings opened in the National Court and in other courts, remain unpunished. The judge of the National Court, Manuel García Castellón, instructor of the Tandem case – which investigates the police mafia led for almost 20 years by the commissioner José Manuel Villarejo – still has an open investigation – piece 34 – which includes the so-called audios of corruption published by EL PAÍS where numerous evidence of the manoeuvres of leaders of the PP and the police leadership of the Ministry of the Interior against the Catalan independence movement are accumulated. More than a year and a half after the investigation was opened, the judge has only taken testimony from the heads of the media outlets that published these audios and none of the politicians or police officers involved in them have been charged for these events.
In addition, in the dozens of separate pieces of the Tandem case still open in the National Court, the informative notes that Villarejo wrote and that reached the political leaders of the Ministry of the Interior are scattered.
La Vanguardia, Eldiario.es and Nacional.catpublished on Monday that the then President of the Government, Mariano Rajoy, received, according to different sources, reports on these illegal operations of the independence movement in sealed envelopes sent to him by his Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz. "We are not at all surprised that Mariano Rajoy knew the details of the dirty war against the independence movement. The Spanish state, with its sewers, has tried everything and failed. Today, it is even more evident that independence is the only way," former Catalan president Pere Aragonès said on Monday.
Fernández Díaz's lawyer denied to EL PAÍS on Monday on behalf of his client that envelopes were sent to Rajoy with reports on police activity against the Catalan independence movement. Interior Ministry leaders between 2012 and 2016 told this newspaper another version: "That Minister Jorge Fernández sent many reports to Rajoy in envelopes is 100% true. What we don't know is if they were Villarejo's informative notes, although we are not surprised, at least in the first years, because there came a time, starting in 2014, when Villarejo's notes lacked credibility." EL PAÍS tried, unsuccessfully, to find out Rajoy's version of these allegations.
Retired police commissioner José Manuel Villarejo speaks to the media as he leaves the National Court on 27 November. ZIPI (EFE) (EFE)
Villarejo has assured several interlocutors, according to his own recordings, that he is the author of an undated and unsigned report with the seal of the Ministry of the Interior that he leaked to certain media for publication a few days before the campaign for the Catalan elections of November 2012. That report detailed all kinds of corruption involving the main Catalan independence leaders, judges and prosecutors, and directors or editors of Catalan newspapers. Many of the allegations in those reports were proven false.
Villarejo, whose intense contacts with the secretary general of the PP, Dolores de Cospedal, and with the former chief of staff of the Minister of the Interior and later Secretary of State, Francisco Martínez, have been accredited in multiple recordings, prepared numerous informative notes on police activities against the Catalan independence movement. 18 of these notes appear in the investigation being conducted in Andorra on account of the alleged extortion by Spanish police of the owners of the BPA to provide documentation on the money laundering of former president Jordi Pujol and his family.
These briefing notes contain all kinds of accusations — some of them false; others that have never been proven—not only against Pujol but against numerous pro-independence politicians or businessmen. These notes went so far as to attribute to Jordi Pujol in Switzerland a fortune of 2,000 million euros, or the payment of six million euros to the prime minister of Latvia in exchange for his support for Catalonia's right to self-determination.
The most compromising conversation recorded by Villarejo in relation to these operations against Catalan independence took place on December 16, 2012. The then Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández, met with Villarejo to define strategies against Catalan independence leaders. In that conversation, the minister asks the police officers for absolute discretion: "This conversation has not existed, is that clear? The minister knows nothing about it. I will deny even under torture that this meeting ever existed."
In that meeting, shortly after the elections in Catalonia were held with a serious setback for CiU, Villarejo explained to the Minister of the Interior how they were going to prosecute certain operations against pro-independence leaders based on "anonymous, informative notes, data collected...". I would like [the complaint] to be presented today," replied the minister, who pointed out in the conversation that "the second complaint does touch Artur Mas [former president of the Generalitat of Catalonia] through the three front men."
That recording, revealed by EL PAÍS a year and a half ago, shows the extent to which the Minister of the Interior was aware of all the manoeuvres of the police under his command against the Catalan independence movement.
The accusations against Artur Mas never came to anything. It was never proven that he had foreign accounts, not even through front men, despite the fact that the patriotic police leaked reports to that effect.
Despite the numerous pieces of evidence in numerous proceedings opened in the National Court and in other courts, these illegal manoeuvres by the police leadership of the Interior Ministry against the Catalan independence movement have so far not received any criminal reproach.
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