These days that much is being written about the crisis in the Conselleria d'Interior on behalf of the Mossos d'Esquadra, repeated references are made to the investigation that the Catalan police began in the spring of 2021 and continues today into the alleged irregularities in the maintenance competitions for the vehicles of the Generalitat Fire Brigade. Well, the central anti-corruption unit requested in November 2021 from the department headed by Joan Ignasi Elena a whole series of documentation related to those contracts and it has not been until now, almost a year later, that the investigators have begun to receive the boxes with the papers, and with droppers.
The situation of paralysis of the investigation pushed the Mossos to present a forceful letter a month ago to the head of the Investigating Court 14 of Barcelona, in which they informed her that although all the previous reports warned that there were no more documentation to be analyzed because "that is how they had told us from the Interior", in reality there was, and a lot of it.
In September, and on the occasion of interviews with the heads of some regions of the Bombers, the investigators discovered that those operational managers accumulated in their offices a large number of boxes with files and documentation that had been waiting for "months" to receive instructions from the Interior.
In the letter to the judge, the investigators add the emails that at the time the different heads of the region sent to their superiors realizing that they had already compiled and prepared the documentation that they had requested and asking what they should do with it.
In their letter, advanced a few days ago by the digital newspaper El Món, the Mossos warn that "it is unlikely that the tasks of collecting the documentation are being referred to the people under investigation, taking into account that they lack a lot of the required documentation and that it is highly probable that part of the documentation that does not appear is a consequence of the obstruction in the progress of the investigation, hindering the exhaustive analysis of the required data.” As a result of that letter, Interior began to forward the documentation to the anti-corruption unit, based in the central complex of Egara, in Sabadell.
The suspicious absence of documentation already caused that, in July, the Mossos entered the central facilities of the Iturri company in Catalonia with a court order to take all the documentation that the Interior was denying them.
The situation is paradoxical, given that the most important reproach that the opposition parties make of Elena is precisely that the changes in the police headquarters do not shield political interference in the investigations.
The cause has been deflated in the media, but it remains alive in the courts, where last week the official who made the reserved information in the department declared after the former Minister of the Interior, Miquel Sàmper, suspected inflated invoices and accounting chaotic that could hide criminal behavior. The sub-inspector of the Mossos who wrote the first reports and the official who kept the powerpoint of the then director of Firefighters, Manel Pardo, with the annotation of 2% that aroused his suspicions, also declared.
In March, Pardo declared before the judge that the annotation is his and that it referred to a variable expense margin that was applied in the event of unexpected breakdowns. He denied that they were illegal commissions.
Shortly before, this newspaper discovered that the Conselleria d'Interior re-awarded Iturri a vehicle maintenance contract that had been annulled by the Catalan Court of Public Sector Contracts. But Interior granted it again to the same company in a "negotiated procedure without publicity" alleging the urgency of the work to be carried out. The contract was signed by the manager of Iturri in Catalonia, Eduardo Díez Hervás, and Brauli Duart, number 2 of the department headed by Miquel Buch.
