Names of companies, corruption, relationships, personal vices, birthday dates, illnesses of their collaborators and of the relatives of their collaborators: "Your father is ill, call him." Everything fits and everything goes on José Manuel Villarejo's agenda, whether it is true or not. On September 12, 2012, with the front pages of the Catalan press on the table, and the photos of the great demonstration of the Diada the day before, a meeting at the Ministry of the Interior served to start the Catalonia operation. Villarejo will receive the order a few weeks later. We must discredit the independence movement. It is the "Barna plan" from his notes. A team coordinated by this veteran agent begins to collect names and rumors, from which he will prepare reports that, sooner or later, will end up in certain media. Villarejo, actually, is already working on it, because after a few years out of the police dedicating himself to his private businesses – precisely, manufacturing reports with which to blackmail the enemies of his clients – now he has one foot inside and the other out. The list of names on his work plan is huge, and he mixes potential independentistas to investigate with guys he makes or wants to make deals with. Some of these names end up receiving one of the broadsides foreseen by the agent: either headlines in the allied press or legal complaints, sometimes based on the alleged pufos revealed by such media. These are the cases that are pending admission or that are considering joining the lawsuit that a Madrid court admitted against Sandro Rosell.
Five members of the Sumarroca family filed a complaint directly before the Supreme Court, because one of the defendants, the former president of the Popular Party of Catalonia, Alicia Sánchez-Camacho, is currently a senator and therefore it is the high court that could eventually investigate and judge her. But the TS argued that the case was already being heard in the National Court, whose central court 6 analyzes the piece Tándem, on Villarejo, and therefore it did not correspond to it, although the National Court has only admitted up to now those cases that affect the private business of the ex-commissioner. Not political cases.
The Sumarroca then went to the investigative courts in Madrid and are waiting. In their letter they accuse Sánchez-Camacho, and various senior officials of the Ministry of the Interior, of the alleged crimes of criminal organization, falsification of an official document, illegal arrests, discovery and disclosure of secrets, and embezzlement of public funds.
According to the businessmen, the "State sewers" acted against them because of their very long and solid ties to the Pujol family, "whose patriarch was considered the factotum of the independence movement."
The Sumarroca family is implicated in the 3% plot, of alleged illegal financing of Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya.
References to builders are frequent in the diaries of the former commissioner, since the meeting that, at the beginning of November 2012, Villarejo held with Sánchez-Camacho at her home in Barcelona. On June 25, 2014, for example, José Manuel Villarejo and his superior, Eugenio Pino, spoke for two hours on, among other topics, "Sumarroca, Andorran banking and the Ferrovial issue." In total there are at least a dozen references to the Sumarroca in said document.
The former president of the Barcelona Football Club Sandro Rosell has not expressly sued Alicia Sánchez-Camacho, precisely to avoid having to go through the TS and undergo the same procedural journey as the Sumarroca. In fact, Rosell's is the only case that has so far passed the first judicial filter – that of the investigating court number 13 in Madrid – and that has begun to be processed. Rosell points to Villarejo himself; chief inspector Alberto Estévez, alleged author of false reports from the economic and fiscal crime unit (UDEF) of the National Police; Antonio Giménez Raso, former inspector and partner of Villarejo in Barcelona; and the American Marc L. Varri, former FBI agent, since Rosell was arrested as a result of an investigation in the US of corruption in soccer, the so-called Fifagate. After almost two years in preventive detention, by order of the then judge of the National Court Carmen Lamela, Rosell was tried and acquitted. Had he gone to the Supreme Court, Rosell might have met Lamela again, since she was promoted to said court.
Carles Vilarrubí was summoned as a witness in the case of Jordi Pujol Ferrusola in November 2014. Vilarrubí, a long-standing militant of the CDC, had successively been general secretary and director of Catalunya Ràdio, general director of the Generalitat gaming entity (EAJA), executive in Barcelona of the Trébol Internacional group, owned by Manuel Prado and Colón de Carvajal, a man very close to the King emeritus. And in 1992 he was CEO of the developer of Port Aventura, in those days owned by Javier de la Rosa, with whom he broke up when the latter wanted to divert the public money approved by Parliament to finance the works into his pocket.
This topic came up at the end of his statement as a witness before the judge, as recorded in the audio of the session. The anti-corruption prosecutor Belén Suárez asked him if he knew the financier and asked Vilarrubí a single question, while showing the cover of a Barcelona newspaper with the photo and some phrases of De la Rosa talking about him: "In this procedure there is various documentation and Information has also been requested from various countries... Andorra, Liechtenstein, the United Kingdom, Mexico and work (...) a testimony from Javier de La Rosa (....) in which he specifically says that in these latest threats He talks about some threats, supposedly, they told him under no circumstances to mention Vilarrubí, [Carles] Sumarroca and [Felip] Massot as people linked to the finances of Pujol [el expresident de la Generalitat] abroad... ”
The witness replied: "I can only say that for eight months I was CEO of the company that managed what would later become Port Aventura and I resigned the day after the Parliament of Catalonia approved a credit of 5,000 million pesetas, at three o'clock In the morning, I had to wake up a notary, because I refused to sign a check to send the funds to a De la Rosa company and I resigned due to the doubt that the next day they would forge my signature.... All I have to do is say".
A year later, on October 26, 2015, Vilarrubí was charged and the following day his home and office were searched by the police, in the presence of Villarejo. Like others involved in the case, the key was the testimony of De la Rosa, who in his conversations with the commissioner and in exchange for at least 150,000 euros, attributed to the executive commission agent relations with the son of the president of the Generalitat. Also the creation of Casinos de Catalunya, actually a company 100% owned by the Suqué family, which according to the complainant diverted 30% of its profits to CDC, the nationalist party. Although he did not appear as a complainant, another shady source from Villarejo, the multiple accused José María Clemente Marcet, also mentioned Vilarrubí.
Two other complaints are waiting in the Madrid investigative courts for the prosecution and the judiciary to define their admission for processing. One is from the former commissioner and former chief of the National Police Force in Catalonia, Narcís Ortega, and the other from the former CEO of Banca Privada d'Andorra, Joan Pau Miquel, both represented by Molins Criminal Defense.
Miquel's complaint is directed against the then Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz; his Secretary of State for Security, Francisco Martínez; the general director of the National Police Force, Ignacio Cosidó, the retired commissioners Eugenio Pino, José Manuel Villarejo, Marcelino Martín-Blas, Celestino Barroso (who was the attaché at the Spanish embassy in Andorra), the inspector Bonifacio Díaz and the commissioner Pedro Esteban, responsible for information in Catalonia.
Miquel considers himself a victim of the Catalonia operation because in 2014 he received pressure from various police officers to reveal whether Jordi Pujol, Oriol Junqueras or Artur Mas had accounts at his bank.
Bank secrecy still existed in Andorra, but Miquel was urged in June 2014, during a visit by the Interior Attaché in Andorra, to reveal said data. Otherwise, BPA would take a “hack blow”. Missed by the requested meeting, Miquel recorded it. Not so to which he later went in Madrid, where he was threatened that the United States would act against BPA for the allegedly criminal nature of some of his clients. The United States, in effect, would decree a year later, on March 10, 2015 (eight years ago today) the closure of BPA through FinCen, a financial control body for terrorism, which included the bank on a blacklist. According to the police, the Chinese, Venezuelan, Russian and Mexican mafias had funds in BPA. Of the three accusations, only one conviction would be produced, and for a tax offense. There was never any news about the Mexicans. BPA believes that the Home Office poisoned the FBI with bloated information. In fact, FinCen withdrew the charge after six months. The case has generated more than 50 complaints in Andorra, where Mariano Rajoy and part of his government are being sued.
Ortega's complaint, in addition to Fernández Díaz, Martínez and Villarejo, is also directed against the former general secretary of the PP and former defense minister, María Dolores de Cospedal. Ortega, who during his posting in the Canary Islands, before arriving in Barcelona in 2008, led numerous corruption investigations against charges from the insular PP, was dismissed by Fernández Díaz as soon as he was appointed minister. In a recording published recently by the digital El Món, the then leader of the Catalan PP, Alicia Sánchez-Camacho, explained to Villarejo that Ortega sympathized with the independentistas. After his dismissal, he was assigned to Teruel, in a much lower position. For Ortega, it was a dismissal "for purely ideological reasons and within the framework of the campaign to harass and demolish anyone who was related to the independence movement," the complaint says.
The former president of the Generalitat Artur Mas matures these days if he files a complaint against the so-called "patriotic police". In an interview over the weekend with Xavi Bundó on RAC1, he said that he would present it if he sees guarantees "that it will go all the way". He will not sue simply as a "testimonial fact" but only if he has "the conviction" that it will have a path. "I am thinking about it and I am seriously evaluating it," he insisted in the interview. The former president added that if the Madrid investigating courts begin to admit, and eventually accumulate, the different cases presented – the defendants do not exactly agree on all of them – they will see how new ones interested in joining appear.
In the agendas of the ex-commissioner there appear about thirty people who are likely to be linked to the independence movement. A report from the Internal Affairs Unit of the National Police made a report detailing that Villarejo had 70 projects underway, that is, clients who commissioned investigations. Some of them, like that of the former vice president of FC Barcelona Susana Monje, later allegedly recycled it in her anti-independence crusade.
The firstborn of the Pujol-Ferrusola family is also expected. Jordi Pujol Ferrusola, accused of the alleged corruption plot that allowed his family to accumulate undeclared funds in Andorra, has tried repeatedly since 2018 to appear in the Tandem summary against Villarejo, without success so far. For the prosecution, Jordi Pujol Ferrusola has no link – “connection” – with the private businesses investigated by Tándem. On the contrary, Pujol did manage to have the Superior Court of Madrid sentence the former operational deputy director of the Police Eugenio Pino –Villarejo chief– to one year in jail for facilitating the National Intelligence Center, the economic and fiscal crime unit (UDEF ) from the National Police and the National Court a flash drive with information about the Pujols obtained illegally.
Piece 27 of Tándem stars private detective Francisco Marco, from the Barcelona agency Método 3, who in 2020 denounced that his arrest, seven years earlier, was illegal and orchestrated by Villarejo. Marco sued the commissioner and his collaborators. According to his account, Villarejo wanted to expel Method 3 from the market because it was his competitor.
The one who was Minister of Economy until November, Jaume Giró, has also filed a complaint in the ordinary courts of Madrid. Giró –Jiro in Villarejo's notes– attributes to the brigade of former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo the surveillance that he says he has suffered in recent years. The defendants are Villarejo himself, María Dolores de Cospedal, Jorge Fernández-Díaz and Francisco Martínez.
The complaints that the former mayor of Barcelona, Xavier Trias, filed against the former Deputy Operations Director of the Police, Eugenio Pino, the former Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz, and the former director of the Anti-Fraud Office of Catalonia, Daniel de Alfonso, remained in court. nothing. For this reason, the current Junts candidate does not want to continue litigating. The journalists who published that he had an account in Switzerland, which proved false, were acquitted.
