Barcelona. Tuesday, 23 May 2017
Patricia López and Carlos Enrique Bayo, the Público journalists that published the famous recording of Jorge Fernández Díaz and Daniel Alfonso, spoke in the Catalan Parliament today. Well, they published that conversation and have for months been researching the police-politico-judicial mafia that exists in Spain and that acts with complete impunity. Allegedly.
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They have been summoned by the Inquiry Committee on the Operation Catalonia and I will try to summarize what they have explained. I say "try" because it is like dirty restaurants, where is so much crap embedded everywhere that you don't know where to start.
The issue is that in Spain, as explained by the two journalists (and, once again, allegedly), there is a parallel police force that does the underhand jobs for the State's sewers and, therefore, acts with impunity. The members of this mafia come from the old Franco regime's political-social police brigade, and once the dictatorship was over, they were placed in private companies thanks to which they became billionaires and weaved their network of very high level contacts. To better understand what we are talking about, reading this piece and this one, published by Bayo in Público, is advisable.
And this mafia network and its stories are like cherries: after eating one, we carry on with a few. It is an organization that connects several police officers with politicians and members of the prosecution and the judiciary. And they are out of control. Or rather, they have so much power and so much information that they are uncontrollable.
As explained by Bayo and López, the "Operation Catalonia" (a name given by a Manos Limpias lawyer) or "Operation State Sewers", began in 2010 with the La Camarga recording. Alicia Sanchez Camacho, with the connivance of Jorge Moragas, Mariano Rajoy's right hand man, convinced Victoria Álvarez, a former girl-friend of Jordi Pujol Ferrusola and a close friend of Moragas, to have the famous conversation. Two Método 3 private detectives that worked for the poice and are paid out of the Government's secret funds (as acknowledged by officer José Manuel Villarejo) and the tape was left in a drawer for three years. The issue exploded, according to Bayo, after the 2012 Rajoy-Mas meeting , when the former Catalan president presents the fiscal pact proposal.
And as from then the following emerged: (1) the La Camarga conversation, (2) the operation to dismantle Método 3, that was used to cover up the work of its two employees and get rid of any evidence on the relationship between Moragas and Victoria Alvarez, (3) the false reports that were then filtered to journalists such as Eduardo Inda that work for the network and who have been shown to have frequently met, and talked on the phone, with Villarejo, (4) the Chief State prosecutor's movements, with such pressure that Eduardo Torres Dulce and Consuelo Madrigal decided to rresign because they were unwilling to stomach certain things and appointments, (5) the Escola Juris emerged, one of Villarejo's businesses which is simply a way of paying huge salaries to judges and prosecutors in exchange for giving classes that do not cost as much, (6) Pequeño Nicolás turned up in the middle of it all, (7) Manos Limpias was set up. It was an implementing tool for blackmail, until it bumped into the monarchy and that was the end of their story, (8) assaults are reported, including a knifing by Villarejo himself, (9) the source of false reports against Trias and Mas was not investigated, nor why they were leaked, (10) The Cierco brothers, Andorran bankers, offered to provide information on the Pujol family, in exchange for impunity for having tried to cover up a case of money laundering they had in the Banco Madrid, which they also own, (11) Villarejo offered Josep Pujol Ferrusola impunity if he brought down the independence process ... and I'll stop now, for otherwise we would still be here tomorrow.
And to cap it all, one fine day, the famous recording of Jorge Fernández Díaz with the then-anti-corruption prosecutor, Daniel Alfonso, came to light. The one about "the prosecutor can fine-tune it for you." This recording, by the way, reached Carlos Enrique Bayo anonymously by mail in an envelope stamped in Barcelona. In a nutshell, someone recorded a minister in his office and the State did not investigate. Nor did it investigate things that are affirmed in the conversation such as "the president knows" or "Sociedad Civil Catalana is one of ours." That is, as Patricia López put it, those who have the obligation to prosecute crime, refuses to do so. And to date, the Prosecutor's office, the office on Villarejo's pay-roll, from which two Chief State prosecutors have resigned because someone did not want them there: this prosecutor's office, then, has yet to not open an investigation ex officio.
And the recording of the minister that sparked off the case, came to light because - as explained by Bayo - the impunity of the network made them take decisions that deeply infuriated part of the police force, that did not agree with this way of doing things and decided go for them.
Of course, you may think that all the two journalists have said are just tall stories. Well, the fact is that the network has lost all all the complaints it has filed against the newspaper, and the prosecutors and judges cited in the published pieces have all kept quiet.
And what do we have at the end of the day? Well, the State has done nothing to clarify the case, if only to dispel suspicions, that the sense of impunity is limitless, and that nothing ever happens here. But we'll talk about this tomorrow.
Oh, by the way, the Catalan Socialist party declined to take part in this committee. Odd.
Original article: http://www.elnacional.cat/ca/opinio/iu-forn-operacio-catalunya-proces_160479_102.html
See also http://www.vilaweb.cat/noticies/operacio-catalunya-periodistes-publico-parlament-de-catalunya-el-testimoni-impressionant/
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