A court in Madrid has opened an investigation into the so-called Operation Catalonia – the maneuvers of police groups directed by the Ministry of the Interior to discredit the independence movement – as a result of a complaint filed by the former president of Barça Sandro Rosell. The head of the Investigating Court Number 13 has admitted for processing the complaint filed by Rosell against the retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo and against various police officers for the crimes of criminal organization, document falsification, accusation and false complaint, embezzlement and illegal detention.
The judicial case, which has advanced this Tuesday The vanguardIt is in an incipient phase. The Prosecutor’s Office had ruled in favor of the competence of the court to investigate the facts. Magistrate Hermenegildo Alfredo Barrera has asked the Police to inform him about the current address of the policemen who are the subject of the complaint to cite them, in his case, as being investigated.
Rosell was accused and acquitted by the National Court for the alleged laundering of commissions for the broadcast of friendly matches of the Brazilian soccer team. The former Barça president spent 21 months in pretrial detention for money laundering and criminal organization and came to face a request for six years in jail at trial. After winning that battle, Rosell decided to go on the attack through a series of legal actions.
The complaint by the former president of Culé, represented by the lawyer Pau Molins, indicates that the retired commissioner Villarejo, but also other positions of responsibility during Operation Catalonia: the chief inspector of the UDEF Alberto Esteve, the former inspector Antonio Giménez Raso —both members of the National Police Corps—and the FBI attaché at the United States embassy in Madrid, Marc L. Varri. He points out all of them for their participation in the preparation of supposedly false reports that served, among other things, to agree on the provisional detention of the businessman.
The complaint points, although it does not shoot, towards the senator of the Popular Party Alicia Sánchez-Camacho. “The role that she is attributed to in the account of the events could more than give her the status of defendant.” Among other steps, Sánchez-Camacho met with Jordi Pujol Ferrusola’s ex-lover, Victoria Álvarez, in which she was the origin of the investigation into the business of the former Catalan president’s family.
The police officers who will be the object of the investigation “had, at the time of the events, the status of authorities and public officials of the Spanish State and acted in the exercise of their respective positions”, indicates the text prepared by Rosell’s lawyers, who has accessed THE COUNTRY.
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The Government spokesperson, Patrícia Plaja, considered the opening of the investigation proceedings to get “to the bottom” of the facts as “good news”, although she has assured that the confidence of the Executive is “little or limited”. Plaja recalled that the events date back to “more than ten years ago” and she regretted that, until now, “no one has considered it appropriate to investigate them.”
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