thus Rajoy put the police leadership at the service of his maneuvers against independence

2024-01-15 11:06:08

The government of Mariano Rajoy used the top of the Spanish police to investigate pro-independence parties outside the law and try to put an end to the Process. He did it for five years, from the massive Day of 2012 until 2016: with public resources, human and material, and even with money from funds set aside to pay confidants in exchange for information that is often contaminated or outright false . All this material ended up on the front pages of Madrid newspapers, especially when electoral campaigns were approaching. All with the aim of manipulating public opinion. This is what emerges from the research published this Monday The vanguard i Eldiario.es and which provides new documents – to which the ARA has also had access – and unpublished testimonies that reveal the way of acting of a government that used public resources to deal with the opponents of the PP.

blank envelopes

The investigation details that these writings were a summary of anonymous reports drawn up by Spanish police officers that were sent to the press on pages without any kind of header or signature and in which mention was made of alleged illegalities by leaders Catalan nationalists or people from their environment. These “informative notes” reached the office of the then Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz, and some of them, according to sources in the case, would also have ended up in the office of Mariano Rajoy. The then minister directed the Catalonia operation and also sent sensitive documentation to Moncloa through escorts. This material was placed in blank envelopes, closed, without subject, neither sender nor recipient. All of this with the complicity and help of the main Spanish police chiefs, such as the operational assistant director, Eugenio Pino, who was the minister’s direct interlocutor.

According to these same documents, the former Minister of the Interior played a very prominent role in these maneuvers because he had demanded to be always informed of all the movements made by the police and judicial leadership. In fact, the reports reached his office regularly, sometimes weekly, at other times fortnightly, and the minister considered the matter of the utmost interest.

At the same time, Daniel de Alfonso, who was then director of the Anti-Fraud Office of Catalonia, was in charge of compiling all kinds of information about independence which he also transferred to the ministry so that the State executive could – serve her The documents that were made public this Monday are related to the attribution to Artur Mas of accounts in Liechtenstein; the accounts in Andorra of the Pujol family, or the case of the false report on the accounts of Xavier Trias in Switzerland.

In most cases these were prospective investigations; that is, motivated by a predetermined political objective but without indications, a legally prohibited practice.

Villarejo’s paper

According to the journalistic investigation, Fernández Díaz instructed his chief of staff, Francisco Martínez, to liaise with former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo to gather this information, and Martínez then ordered that any relevant data be delivered in writing. This was the entry way of Villarejo with the highest commands of the Interior and the way in which the so-called informative notes.

Among these documents was a series of five on the case of the Palau de la Música that anticipates the story detailed in the informational note sent by Villarejo to the Police Department and the Minister.

In addition, to access the highest offices of the PP the commissioner would have had another shortcut: the businessman Ignacio López del Hierro, husband of the party’s number two, María Dolores de Cospedal. The sources consulted by these media also point out that, during that time, Cristóbal Montoro’s Ministry of Finance was “very active” in everything that had to do with the investigation of nationalist leaders, and point out that some of the publications of confidential information about Catalan taxpayers left the top of his ministry.