Xavier Trias yesterday demanded the dismissal of the judge of the National High Court Fernando Andreu after a conversation between the togado and José Manuel Villarejo was leaked in which the former commissioner of the National Police Corps, the visible face of the so-called sewers of the State and the patriotic police , recognized that the information that appeared in El Mundo about bank accounts in Switzerland of the then mayor of Barcelona was false. “This man has to be dismissed, or charged for hiding information,” Trias said yesterday at RAC1.
The former leader of Convergència in the Catalan capital, in conversation with this medium, points out that he will study legal actions with his lawyers, although he points out that the best thing is for the Prosecutor's Office to decide to investigate the matter ex officio, since in the demands he presented he was told that El Mundo could not be sued as the judges understood that the information received by the journalists, coming from the Interior, was true. He also could not sue the Ministry because the recordings are not valid evidence and now he would be in a similar situation, he explains. "What I will never do again is spend a lot of money," he says.
Still, Trias believes that the leak of the conversation now serves to make it abundantly clear that he was innocent. "It was very clear that it was a setup, and now there are no arguments for them to tell me that it is not true," he highlights.
In a conversation -revealed by El Món- at a meal attended by the commissioner, Judge Andreu, the president of La Razón and the director of the Intelligence Center against Terrorism and Organized Crime (Citco), José Luis Olivera, Villarejo reported that he had "sold the donkey" to journalists from the Editorial Unit newspaper and explained that after Trias's denials, with a document from the Swiss banking regulator, which showed that the account attributed to him was false, the at that time Minister of the Interior, Jorge Fernández Díaz, was angry and had asked that “heads roll”. Before the arrival of the magistrate to the meal, the number two of the Interior, Francisco Martínez, in a call to the former commissioner, showed his concern.
“It is grotesque, shameful and surprising,” highlights the former mayor of Barcelona, who also believes that it is “pathetic” that such a meeting was recorded and then leaked.
Sources from JxCat, the party to which Trias now belongs and which he could lead in the 2023 municipal elections in Barcelona, ridiculed yesterday about the fact that Andreu is the magistrate specialized in humanitarian law and in the prosecution of war crimes. "A public official has to denounce these facts if he has knowledge of them," commented these sources.
