09:25
The Audios of Corruption.
Chapter 10
The Internal Affairs Unit of the Police sent Judge Manuel García Castellón, instructor of
the Tándem case
, a 150-page report detailing some police maneuvers perpetrated against Catalan independentists.
The report included recordings found in the home of commissioner José Manuel Villarejo and responded to a request from Jordi Pujol Ferrusola.
The eldest son of the former president of Catalonia denounced to the judge in September 2020 that he had suffered illegal espionage many years before and that different whistleblowers had been paid with public money who presented "formed statements with an allegedly incriminating sign" against him or his family. .
The instructor of
the Tándem case
, Manuel García Castellón, rejected the appearance of Pujol Ferrusola in the case and ruled out opening a separate piece on account of these maneuvers against independence leaders, considering that the recordings only proved police work against corruption or that, in the case of the alleged extortion of the owners of an Andorran bank to provide confidential data of former President Pujol, was already being investigated in that country.
Part of the recordings of Villarejo to which EL PAÍS and the digital
Fuentes Informadas
have had access underpin the Internal Affairs police report with new evidence on the police set-ups of Operation Catalonia and on espionage without a court order on Jordi Pujol Ferrusola.
The threat: either Operation Catalonia continues or a notarial certificate of the dirty war is drawn up.
November 29, 2012. Villarejo meets in the morning at the Tomate bar, very close to the Ministry of the Interior, with Francisco Martínez, then the minister's chief of staff.
The commissioner reproaches the politician for wanting to "put in the fridge" a new operation consisting of the filing of a complaint by his informant, the Catalan financier Javier de la Rosa, before the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit (UDEF) to mount a legal case against the Catalan independentistas.
The "movement" to which Villarejo refers is the apocryphal police report that denounced numerous corruptions, most of them false, of the main leaders of Catalonia.
Villarejo had leaked that report to
El Mundo
two weeks earlier , after consulting Martínez.
The different publications about that police report marked a part of the Catalan electoral campaign, sowing suspicion about the Catalan separatists.
CiU lost 12 of its 62 seats.
Annotation of November 22, 2012 in Villarejo's agenda about the plans with Javier de la Rosa to present the complaint against the Pujols after the elections on the 25th.
Entry of November 29, 2012 in Villarejo's agenda about the meeting with Paco Martínez, whom Chisco calls, and about a conversation with José Luis Olivera, head of CITCO.
On November 29, 2012, the minister's chief of staff authorized Villarejo to go ahead with the operation, but reminded him that there was a problem: the lack of money to pay the informant.
(...)
A few minutes later, the minister's chief of staff relents.
The commissioner reassured Martínez on several occasions about these clandestine operations against the Catalan independence movement.
The commissioner insists, in his recorded conversation with Martínez, on the importance of paying the debt that he has supposedly assumed out of pocket.
The judicial investigation has not yet proven whether Javier de la Rosa collected money from the reserved funds of the Interior for some confidences – corruption complaints against former president Jordi Pujol and his successor, Artur Mas – which he later retracted in court.
In the report that Internal Affairs sent to the judge, a conversation recorded by Villarejo on November 29 is transcribed, in which his partner, Rafael Redondo, and Javier de la Rosa himself participate.
(...)
A few hours after this conversation, Javier de la Rosa, accompanied by Villarejo's partner lawyer, entered the UDEF to formalize a complaint that he extended only a week later, on December 5.
A day later, on the 6th, Villarejo made several entries in his diary about different characters involved in the maneuvers based on De la Rosa's complaint: Interior
number 2
, Paco Martínez (Chisco);
the Minister of Defense and General Secretary of the PP, María Dolores de Cospedal;
the businessman Javier de la Rosa;
the former head of the UDEF Manuel Vázquez (Fiti);
the head of CITCO, José Luis Olivera;
and the Deputy Director of Operations, Eugenio Pino.
Annotations in the agenda of Villarejo of December 6, 2012.
At the same time, Villarejo had a parallel operation underway, of which the chief of staff of the Minister of the Interior was informed, with Jordi Pujol's ex-lover, Victoria Álvarez, to formalize another complaint similar to that of Javier de la Rosa and prosecute both.
These two police initiatives against the Catalan independence movement, at the time of the birth of the secessionist challenge, were endorsed by the Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz, in the meeting he held with Villarejo on December 16 and which was also recorded by the commissioner.
The Commissioner for Internal Affairs involved in Operation Catalonia.
Marcelino Martín Blas was chief commissioner of Internal Affairs when Operation Catalonia was launched from the Interior and collaborated with Villarejo in some of the initiatives aimed at discrediting Catalan independence.
Among Villarejo's recordings, there are some related to Jordi Pujol Ferrusola's ex-lover, who denounced him for his trips to Andorra loaded with bags with 500-euro bills.
The eldest son of the former Catalan president was the subject of surveillance that he denounced to Judge Manuel García Castellón.
The police report that they sent to the instructor of
the Tándem case
collected many recordings of Villarejo on maneuvers against the independence movement, but no evidence of those illegal monitoring that Pujol Ferrusola denounced much later.
But among the material seized from the commissioner in his different properties are conversations with the Commissioner of Internal Affairs about the adventures of the eldest son of the former Catalan president.
Entry in Villarejo's agenda for April 29, 2014, about his conversation with the head of Internal Affairs, Marcelino Martín Blas.
None of these operations were carried out with a court order, despite the fact that judges and prosecutors were already investigating various cases of corruption of Catalan leaders.
The case opened against Jordi Pujol Ferrusola ended with an indictment against the entire family for being part of a criminal plot that was enriched thanks to the collection of illegal commissions from contractors of the Generalitat.
"A team is needed for these sons of bitches of the Catalans"
Francisco Martínez, chief of staff of the Minister of the Interior Jorge Fernández Díaz during his first year in office, and Secretary of State for Security during the following years, met for the first time with Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo a few months after being appointed.
He did it by order of his boss, as he has declared to the judge.
Since then, Francisco Martínez maintained an intense relationship with Villarejo on different topics.
Among them, many of the police initiatives against the Catalan independence movement.
The relationship they had was so special that the commissioner came to reproach Martínez for ordering him to “put in the fridge” some operations.
That is the context of the conversation on November 29, 2012 that Villarejo recorded.
The Catalan independentistas had begun the path towards secession, and Commissioner Villarejo warned Martínez of the danger that was coming: "Hard times are coming and you have to have a team of honest, serious and tough people for these sons of bitches of the Catalans and for these Basque sons of bitches.
The Basques have been scared, I know.
As a result of this they have shit.
Therefore, you have to lower the profile, dammit.
You and I have done this service... And this work, one day someone will write about it because we have changed the history of this country, listen to me.
But I've changed it many times, many stories, and that touches my dick, do you understand?
(...) I hit them where it hurts, in the core.
Everything had been forgotten, but I'm back, boom! I got the
The World
, and hell, and the whole world to shit ".
Everything that Villarejo ventured in November 2012 took place in the following years.
The Catalan Government walked towards independence despite the judicial requirements against it, while a group of commissioners from the leadership of the Ministry of the Interior, headed by Eugenio Pino, deputy operational director of the Police, launched operations to discredit the Catalan independence leaders.
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