The CEO of BPA sues in Madrid against the police of the Catalunya operation

The CEO of Banca Privada d'Andorra, Joan Pau Miquel, has filed a complaint against the police leadership of the last PP government for the maneuvers of the so-called "patriotic police", to which he attributes the extortion and illegal movements that ended with the closure of this bank and its Spanish subsidiary, Banco Madrid.

Thomas Osborne
Thomas Osborne
25 September 2022 Sunday 19:41
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The CEO of BPA sues in Madrid against the police of the Catalunya operation

The CEO of Banca Privada d'Andorra, Joan Pau Miquel, has filed a complaint against the police leadership of the last PP government for the maneuvers of the so-called "patriotic police", to which he attributes the extortion and illegal movements that ended with the closure of this bank and its Spanish subsidiary, Banco Madrid. In 2014, BPA was the third party in the Pyrenean country and had 29,000 clients and managed some 9,400 million euros; its Spanish subsidiary had about 15,000, with 5,700 million.

The defendants are the then Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz; his secretary of state, Francisco Martínez; the general director of the National Police Corps, Ignacio Cosidó; the curators –retired- Eugenio Pino, José Manuel Villarejo and Marcelino Martín-Blas; Chief Police Inspectors Celestino Barroso and Bonifacio Díaz; and Commissioner Pedro Esteban, responsible for information services in Catalonia. The complaint considers that the maneuvers of this group liquidated the two entities, after unsuccessfully trying to extort bank executives to provide information on the accounts that the Police believed that three pro-independence leaders -Artur Mas, Oriol Junqueras and Jordi Pujol - hid in BPA.

The complaint accuses the nine police officers of the alleged crimes of criminal organization, threats, illegal detention, falsehood of official in official document, embezzlement of public funds and false testimony in parliamentary appearance.

The text, presented by the lawyer Pau Molins on behalf of Miquel, details that in 2014 it was Cosidó who, as Director General of the Police, instructed his police commanders to focus their investigations against the Pujol family on BPA and leave aside another Andorran entity, Andbank, "because in this entity apparently funds belonging to the emeritus king of Spain Juan Carlos I de Borbón were kept," says the complaint.

The complaint details how, on June 3, 2014, Barroso visited Miquel in his office in Andorra la Vella. Alerted by a previous call to the president of the bank, Miquel decided to record the conversation. Barroso went to tell him that the Bank of Spain had the intention of "charging" Banco Madrid, but that this could be stopped if they agreed to certain requests.

Barroso said he did not know what it was about, and added that Miquel would be contacted again for another meeting in Madrid.

Among other things, Barroso said that “the Bank of Spain is going to take on Banco Madrid and that there are Americans willing to take charge once the Bank of Spain hacks it and that all of this can be paralyzed as long as you agree. , that it is in your power to stop it. In his hand. What is going to be asked of him, I don't know. I have told Higinio [Cierco, president of BPA], man, I, particularly, from my point of view, speaking does not cost anything, then a series of papers is planted on the table and the inspection is famous that they have told me me, which later cannot be carried out because there is an antecedent of form or whatever and there is no room, I get up from the table and leave. That they present the situation to me and that it is real and what they ask of me is perfectly feasible, or that there is no problem that I cannot paralyze one thing or another, talking costs nothing”.

Miquel was summoned again on June 6 at the Villamagna Hotel in Madrid by a certain Félix Rodríguez, who was actually Marcelino Martín-Blas. He reported directly to the Deputy Director of Operations (DAO), Eugenio Pino. All of them appear in dozens of journalistic or judicial investigations as leaders of Operation Catalonia, which employed some seventy agents, according to the complaint. The Secretary of State Francisco Martínez Vázquez and the minister, Fernández Díaz, were supposedly aware of all these movements.

In that meeting, the agent began by pointing out to Miquel that he knew private aspects of his family, before referring to the inspection of Banco Madrid by the Ministry of Finance's anti-money laundering service (Sepblac): "You have problems with Banco Madrid, but above all You all have problems with the Americans," said Martín-Blas, who claimed to have good relations with his "police friends at the United States Embassy."

The police command showed Miquel a written note in which it could be read that the state was "at war" against Catalan nationalism and wanted information about the accounts of Artur Mas, Oriol Junqueras and Jordi Pujol. He knew, he claimed, that they had funds in BPA and that he only needed confirmation. Miquel claimed that they had nothing to do with it.

There was a second meeting on June 18, in which Miquel insisted that he did not have that information, and that was answered by Martín-Blas with the threat that they would have "problems" with Sepblac and with FinCen, the American organization created after 9/11 for the control of capital that could finance terrorist activities.

After this meeting, Miquel received a call from a certain Juan Antonio: twenty years ago, when he worked at Banca Cassany, he had to travel to a French town and deliver 10 million pesetas to that person, who never knew if he was a police officer to the fight against ETA in France. Martín-Blas was outraged when, in the third meeting, on June 25, he saw that Miquel showed up at a new meeting with documentation referring to Juan Antonio.

Shortly after, on July 7, El Mundo published the news of the Pujol family's alleged accounts in Andorran banking entities, with the headline "The Pujol family deposited 3.4 million in a month in an Andorran bank." The published information contained data on transfers made in 2010 from ANDBANK to BPA by only some members of the Pujol family.

After this publication, Jordi Pujol decided on July 25 to make a public confession that he had had money in Andorra for decades, from an inheritance from his father.

Regarding BPA, the government of Andorra ended up receiving notification from FinCen about the existence of certain conflictive clients in BPA, linked to the Russian and Chinese mafias, the Sinaloa cartel and Venezuelan funds of dubious origin. The complaint maintains that "for none of such procedures, to date", there has been no conviction.

In a recently published conversation with Villarejo, he says: “We believed that the BPA was hiding information about the Pujols from us; we contacted our American Intelligence colleagues and FinCen and sent them reports riddled with lies; We said that the entity facilitated money laundering to Venezuelan and Russian clients, we scared them, and they acted »".

A complaint for the same facts was filed in the Andorran courts, although it includes the then president of the government, Mariano Rajoy. It was admitted for processing. The complaint now taken to the National High Court already visited this court in July. Joan Pau Miquel tried to connect it with the one against Villarejo for Operation Tandem, but it was dismissed by the court, which will now debate its admission again.