Pedro Sánchez's government continued to pay a key confidant of Operation Catalunya with reserved funds for almost half a year, according to RAC1. Until now it was taken for granted that the dirty war against the independence movement in the sewers of the State had been extinguished with the end of Mariano Rajoy's government, but the reality is that payments to at least one confidant of the network continued throughout of the first months of the PSOE government, already with Fernando Grande-Marlaska as Minister of the Interior.
The source in question was Jordi Pujol Ferrusola's ex-partner, Victoria Álvarez, who provided all kinds of information about the Pujol family and the Convergència environment to the patriotic police. It was known that Álvarez had collected reserved funds at least between 2012 and 2015, but now El Món a RAC1 has discovered that the payments lasted for many more years and continued when Fernando Grande-Marlaska arrived at the Ministry of the Interior, in June 2018. It was not until the end of that year that Álvarez stopped collecting money.
The ex-partner of the Pujols' first-born received around 2,500 euros each month. Therefore, in Marlaska's first months as Minister of the Interior, Álvarez, who at the time claimed a lifetime pension, pocketed more than 10,000 euros of public money. It was black money that he should not declare, because the reserved funds are completely opaque. In fact, he collected them in cash, in an envelope that collaborators from the Spanish police sent him to Barcelona.
His case is unique because, in that period, no other confidant of Operation Catalunya was still in the pay of the patriotic police. Now, several sources explain to RAC1 that, also with the PSOE in Moncloa, some police officers maintained contacts with other informants, apart from Álvarez, located around the independence movement. They did not receive a fixed salary, but the cost of the meetings (travel, meals, etc.) was covered with public money.
One of the first measures that Fernando Grande-Marlaska ordered when he took the reins of the Ministry of the Interior, in the summer of 2018, was to order an audit of the reserved funds, which raised major eyebrows. The colonel of the UCO, Manuel Sánchez Corbí, leaked to the media that the main investigation unit of the Civil Guard was running out of funds because Marlaska had decided to halt the delivery of reserved funds until the audit was completed. Corbí, who was in charge of managing these funds during the years that the political police operated for the Ministry of the Interior, was dismissed. That audit lasted months; The study was not an easy task. And in it the payments to Victoría Álvarez were detected, which were then suppressed.
