Santi Vila, former Minister of Culture and then of Business during the Government led by Carles Puigdemont, stated this morning that the former president of the Generalitat offered the Government of Mariano Rajoy to renounce the unilateral referendum in exchange for improvements in self-government. According to Vila, it was he himself who was in charge of sending the proposal to the vice president of the Spanish Executive at that time, Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría, in March 2017.
"I took a proposal to Moncloa and it was received by the Vice President of the Government, Soraya Sáez de Santamaría, in which it was proposed to identify which articles of the Statute had been unjustly removed, which ones continually collided with the powers of the State," he stated today in an interview in Ser Catalonia. The offer also proposed seeking a "viable and feasible tax reform and what aspects of the third additional should be met from a financing point of view."
Once the initiative was approved, the former councilor stressed that after four or five years it would be the citizens who would vote on the degree of compliance with that agreement.
Vila's statements are transcendent in today's context, when the PSOE negotiates with Junts the investiture of Pedro Sánchez as President of the Government. The socialists seem willing to push forward an amnesty law - of which not even a draft is known - in exchange for the post-convergents and Puigdemont explicitly renouncing the unilateral route. The former president explains in one of his books Vila's meeting with Santamaría, although he does not specify that he endorses the offer communicated by the former minister.
In any case, for that March 2017 proposal, Vila not only had the endorsement of Carles Puigdemont. He assures that Artur Mas was also happy to communicate the offer. Of course: "With their skepticism always, this approach was authorized, absolutely convinced that it would not give results." On September 28, 2016, Puigdemont saved a trust issue with his promise "referendum or referendum."
The former minister wanted to emphasize that he had the approval of both former presidents: "He was a member of the Government who, authorized by the president of the Generalitat and in the knowledge of President Mas, went to the Moncloa and brought a proposal of these characteristics; and he did not "He entered on his own, he entered with the official car of the Government of the Generalitat, with Mossos d'Esquadra." "And that appears in the Moncloa entry record; another thing is that the vice-presidency of the Government and the PP now say that this never ended up existing, but there is an entry record in the Moncloa," he added.
"If it was considered that the State had effectively repaired all the breaches, then we had killed the dog and we had killed the rabies, and we were looking forward again," he maintained, alluding to a unilateral referendum that weeks later was set for October 1 of 2017.
