Javier de la Rosa, more apparent than real source of the Catalonia operation, seemed to have two main objectives in his role as initial whistleblower in the campaign to smear the independence movement, according to his own words collected in conversations recorded by José Manuel Villarejo . The first, to get money to face their difficult economic situation, without regular income, with properties mortgaged and threatened with foreclosure and with large debts.
A large part of his conversations with the commissioner, since the first on November 10, 2012, on two occasions, and then in the following days, is to make him aware of the precarious state of his accounts and the urgent need to deposit money. And he made his intentions clear to him: "I am interested in this collaboration to collect and pay four or five pending accounts." Villarejo did not finish taking De la Rosa very seriously, but it served as a cover for him to file a complaint with the UDEF and hide the source of other information, his partner José María Clemente.
De la Rosa's second objective, according to those dialogues, was to take revenge on former convergent leaders, especially Jordi Pujol; businessmen he has dealt with in the past; and especially Carles Vilarrubí, who was for only a few months in 1992 CEO of what would end up being the current Port Aventura, an emblematic project for the financier, but which crashed with the executive's refusal to divert billions to his private accounts. of the old pesetas endorsed by the Parliament of Catalonia. From that moment on, De la Rosa came under suspicion and was subjected to strict controls to prevent new sections of the public guarantee from disappearing. In the end he was removed from the construction of the park. But Vilarrubí and his family were followed and his phones were tapped.
In their conversations, De la Rosa attributes him, since the creation of Casinos de Catalunya, actually owned by the Suqué family, to having killed Prodieco or being a commission agent for the Pujol family. In the end, in his complaint, after receiving 150,000 euros according to Villarejo's schedule, he explicitly mentioned that people from the CDC had threatened him if he spoke about the former Port Aventura counselor.
During the late eighties and mid-nineties Javier de la Rosa was one of the stars of the Spanish economic firmament. With the money from the Kuwaiti investment fund KIO, he bought and sold companies, moved the Spanish stock market at will, launched takeover bids and put pressure on its rivals and competitors with practices denounced in the courts and the Police. They were years of wine and roses in which his relationship with the truth was practically non-existent. But this race was being financed by looting Kuwaiti investments. The paroxysm came with the first war in Iraq, when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait and hundreds of billions of pesetas evaporated from the accounts of his companies in Spain. The Kuwaitis reacted and charged De la Rosa, denouncing him before the Spanish and British courts. He and his accomplices were sentenced to prison in various instances in Madrid, Barcelona and London and multimillion-dollar compensation was imposed on them that they could never pay.
De la Rosa still had time to empty the coffers of Gran Tibidabo, a Barcelona investment company with tens of thousands of small investors in its capital. After the long legal plucking, he withdrew from public life for many years until the Catalonia operation brought him back to fame. In his first meeting, Villarejo introduced himself under a false name and as a lawyer linked to the PP, he also slipped that Alicia Sánchez-Camacho, the leader of that party in Barcelona, had spoken to him about him. And when asked if he knew anything about Catalan politicians, he launched into explaining his alleged financial relationships with Jordi Pujol, Miquel Roca, Xavier Trias, José María Aznar and Rodrigo Rato. He also showed the policeman photos with businessmen, bankers and even the royal family. But Villarejo's insistence on whether he had proof or documents was always answered with evasions and future promises. Regarding his patrimonial situation, De la Rosa undressed and explained that his private home, in the name of his wife, was mortgaged and that the holder of the debt, a Madrid lawyer, wanted to execute it.
That is why he asked Villarejo to press for this not to happen in exchange for his collaboration, which the policeman did. He also explained that his debts and needs reached twenty million euros, his maximum goal. The policeman spoke sardonically of that amount with Francisco Martínez, chief of staff of Minister Jorge Fernández Díaz, when he reported the demands of the Catalan . Although he already tells him that 250,000 would be enough, Villarejo's interlocutor makes it clear that "we are dry" and refuses to assume the payment. And so it is in reality. From the stratospheric initial amount, De la Rosa lowers the threshold until he asks for "250,000 euros, holy water", with a kind of advance in several phases. And they would not come from the Interior, but supposedly from María Dolores de Cospedal, then general secretary of the PP.
