A private espionage assignment carried out by Villarejo's company to obtain dirty laundry and extort money from the Catalan businessman Xavier Vinyals ended up being used three years later for his charges in the Volhov operation.
Vinyls, president of the Pro Seleccions Catalanes Platform and ex-consul of Latvia, was arrested in October 2020 along with David Madí, Oriol Solé and Xavier Vendrell for their alleged relationship with the financing of the process through the entity he presided over. The case against Vinyals in Volhov, for which he is still indicted, began with a complaint filed anonymously before the Police Economic and Financial Crimes Unit (UDEF) in 2019. It was traced, paragraph by paragraph, from the report produced by José Manuel Villarejo for his private business.
The commissioner's detective company investigated Vinyals in 2016 at the request of his ex-brother-in-law, Daniel Castells, with whom he had a dispute over a family business and whom he had denounced for misappropriation. Castells, who would end up convicted, hired the services of the company I D Investigation and Management Services to investigate Vinyals and blackmail him. Either he withdrew the lawsuit against him or he should bear the consequences. The commission is being investigated in piece 33 of the Tandem macro-cause in the National Court, which deals with the private businesses of the retired commissioner.
The 26-page report, dated November 16, 2016, was entitled: Reputational Investigation (moral and business solvency) of Xavier Vinyals. Villarejo's team named it Project Goblin, a possible mockery of the victim's physical resemblance to a monster from popular folklore. The objective, according to the document itself, was to look for "useful indications of some dishonest attitude or situation." The report collected the entire business life of Vinyals, and compiled the notarial records of all his financial operations and the trips he made abroad, information that could only be accessed by public officials. In the investigation of the National Court, it has been discovered that a Civil Guard agent accessed police bases to obtain the confidential data of Vinyals.
The anonymous complaint that reached the UDEF, on August 13, 2019, contains identical paragraphs to those of the report that Villarejo presented to his client and maintains the same structure when describing the alleged irregularities. The anonymous complaint warned of anomalies in the award of subsidies to the Pro Seleccions Catalanes Platform directly and without a public call, as well as the alleged irregular granting of credits. It was based on confidential documents that only public officials, such as police officers, have access to.
I D Investigation and Management Services collected 15,000 euros from Vinyals' ex-brother-in-law, according to the brief presented by Vinyals before the judge. The company was directed by Antonio Giménez Raso, a former police inspector who had gone into the private sector and who was Villarejo's man in Catalonia, to whom he commissioned both investigations for his detective company and of a political-police nature, within the framework of of the Catalonia operation.
It was Giménez Raso who carried out the extortion. He contacted Vinyals' lawyer and told him that if he did not withdraw the complaint against Castells, information would come out that could affect his reputation.
The Vinyals case condenses the modus operandi of Villarejo, who used his status as a high police command to traffic in confidential information and sell it to the highest bidder. And, if there was a chance, he would recycle it for his police reports. Or vice versa.
Unlike other people who consider themselves victims of the Catalonia operation, whose complaints have been rejected by the judge of the National Court investigating Tándem for lack of "connection", the Vinyals case has indeed been included in the macro-cause, be a private commission to the Villarejo company.
The Spanish government withdrew Vinyals's diplomatic credentials as Latvian consul after a newspaper published an image of a pro-independence flag hanging in the building that housed the legation, where the businessman also had his private home.
Another episode related to Latvia also appears in Villarejo's diaries. Everything indicates that in February 2016, the commissioner and his police collaborators leaked to the media an alleged police report that accused the Pujol family of having paid six million euros to the former Latvian prime minister and then vice president of the European Commission, Valdis Dombrovskis. , to support the independence of Catalonia.
In the Volhov case, which focuses on the Russian connections of the process, it is being investigated whether the subsidies that Vinyals received with the Platform Pro Seleccions Catalanes served to pay for Carles Puigdemont's stay in Belgium.
