The Barcelona court investigating the
Pegasus case
received this Thursday, 24 hours before the former director of the CNI Paz Esteban was declared under investigation, the judicial orders that supported the espionage of the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, as confirmed to EL PAÍS legal sources.
Esteban declares this Friday at noon as being investigated by videoconference from Madrid.
At the beginning of this week, the Executive sent to the judge the agreement of the Council of Ministers that declassified the three judicial orders that authorized tapping the telephone of the then Catalan vice president, but not the orders themselves.
Government sources attributed the delay in sending them to “a bureaucratic error” that was corrected when it became known.
The Prosecutor's Office and Aragonès' lawyer will thus be able to have access to the Supreme Court magistrate's records that supported the espionage of the Catalan president in order to be able to ask Esteban more carefully, who as an investigator can take advantage of her right not to testify.
Contrary to what was contained in the Catalan president's complaint - based on the report from the Citezan Lab at the University of Toronto (Canada) - the secret service's eavesdropping was not limited to January 2020, at a time when Pedro Sánchez's investiture was not being negotiated, but it began in July 2019, when Aragonès was vice president of a Government led by Quim Torra and months before the Supreme Court handed down the sentence that sent the leaders of the process (
including
Oriol) to prison.
Junqueras) and unleashed a wave of protests, some violent, in Catalonia. The intervention of Aragonès' cell phone with the Pegasus program was extended twice, in October 2019 and January 2020, for periods of three months. That is, to Upon hearing the reports presented to him by the CNI, the judge who controls the activities of the secret service considered that there was a basis to maintain the eavesdropping on the leader of the Republican Left of Catalonia (ERC) until April 2020.
The president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, at the Palau de la Generalitat this Tuesday.
Quique García (EFE)
The Minister of Defense, Margarita Robles, assured this Thursday in Congress that “what has been declassified is everything essential” so that the former director of the secret service Paz Esteban can answer the judge's questions this Friday.
Although she did not want to reveal the content of the declassified records, she added: "What has become clear from the documentation that has already been provided to the court is that everything that has been done was done with judicial authorization."
The Government partially declassified the documents related to the spying on Aragonès with the Israeli
software
Pegasus on January 16.
The judge had previously requested those papers as part of the open investigation.
This week, the Executive sent a letter in which it transferred to the court the agreement of the Council of Ministers in which it authorizes access to the Supreme Court records that, presumably, supported the interference in the device.
The Executive did not initially send the documents, but the resolutions have finally been delivered, according to the same sources.
Even without the papers on the table, the head of the investigating court number 29 of Barcelona had decided to maintain the appearance.
Esteban will testify by videoconference from Madrid and the parties will hear his version of the events from a room in the City of Justice in Barcelona.
The judge's request for information from the Government goes far beyond the Supreme Court's orders.
The magistrate required all the information that the CNI had about the purchase and use of Pegasus and about the “specific people” who, on behalf of this organization, purchased the program.
The declassification of Government papers is partial and affects only the judicial endorsement of espionage, while the rest of the information remains prohibited with the argument that the security of the secret service agents could be compromised.
The State Attorney's Office, which defends the former director of the CNI, opposed the admission of the complaint, its summons as investigated and the delivery of confidential information.
After the outbreak of the
Pegasus case,
Esteban was relieved of her position.
In Congress, she admitted that the agency had accessed Aragonès' phone, but always with judicial authorization.
The
Pegasus case
has given rise to various legal actions by those affected by the alleged espionage, although Aragonès is the one that has made the most progress.
In July 2022, the Catalan president filed a complaint against Paz and against NSO Group, the Israeli company that owns the Pegasus cyberespionage system.
The scandal came to light following a report carried out by Citizen Lab, a group linked to the University of Toronto (Canada) and specialized in cybersecurity.
According to this investigation, at least 63 politicians, lawyers and pro-independence activists had been targeted by Pegasus on key days for the Catalan secessionist movement after 2017.
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