The Civil Guard detains businessman Josep Campmajo in the operation for the diversion of funds to the procés.Gloria Sanchez / Europa Press
The Barcelona judge who this morning ordered the arrest of the circle closest to the
former president
Carles Puigdemont for diversion of public funds is also investigating the connections of that group with the Russian government.
Telephone conversations held by the Civil Guard show how the detainees sought a rapprochement with the Kremlin during the Catalan autumn of 2017 and in the following months.
The judge points out that the group's meetings and contacts served the "disinformation and destabilization strategy" promoted by Vladimir Putin's executive against the European Union.
On May 28, 2018, Víctor Terradellas had to travel to Russia to meet with a group created “in the time of Gorbachev,” indicates the judicial order that EL PAÍS has accessed, to develop a cryptocurrency platform.
The initiative had come from Xavier Vendrell, one of the arrested businessmen and who was a member of the Puigdemont Sanhedrin during the process.
The objective was "to guarantee the financial stability" of the Generalitat and "to avoid the control of the State in the capital movements".
Terradellas, link of the former Catalan president on international issues, could not attend the appointment: four days before, he was arrested by the Civil Guard in an investigation that was the origin of the operation this Wednesday.
According to the telephone conversations of Terradellas, that so-called "Russian group" with which he had contact wanted to "participate in the communication issues" developed by Vendrell, by businessman David Madí -who was Artur Mas's campaign manager- and by the founder of Mediapro, Jaume Roures They were "willing to invest between 100 and 300 million dollars", according to Terradellas commented in his conversations with Vendrell.
The independence movement describes the police operation as "assembly"
The Civil Guard detains four people from the Puigdemont nucleus for the diversion of public money to the 'procés'
Terradellas gave him another piece of information: on October 24, 2017, the "head" of that group had offered Puigdemont "to have 10,000 soldiers and pay all the Catalan debt" if he proclaimed independence.
But the ex-president, fled to Belgium from Spanish justice, "shit his panties."
The judge gives some credibility to this account by pointing out that, had Puigdemont accepted the offer, "the events would probably have been tragic and would have triggered an armed conflict with the State with an uncertain number of fatalities."
The second leg of the alleged Russian plot has to do with the communication businessman Oriol Soler, also arrested.
As published by EL PAÍS, Soler met with Julian Assange at the Ecuadorian embassy in London in November 2017. The meeting, concludes the judge, "is part of the strategy of disinformation and destabilization in which the government of the Kremlim as part of a narrative of a European Union on the verge of collapse. "The judge accuses Soler of proposing a" coordinated communication strategy "that had the ultimate objective of Russia's" information war. "Soler, the car adds, traveled to Saint Petersburg in June 2017.