The ‘Pegasus case’, also known as ‘Catalangate’, is a fire that has already ravaged the former CNI director, Paz Esteban, but which seems far from being extinguished. When the flames have reached the Barcelona City Council, they have also found fertile land. There is one year left for the municipal elections, and the three major parties in the consistory, ERC, ‘comuns’ and PSC, are in one way or another concerned by the scandal. It is evident that ‘Pegasus’ is serving to take positions in the electoral race.
Sources of the ‘comuns’ in the City Council maintain that the possibility of appearing in person in one of the open causes in this regard is being analyzed. At the moment, a dozen courts – the National High Court, the Investigating Court number 32 in Barcelona, another in Madrid, the Supreme Court and rooms in five other countries – will see in one way or another the espionage carried out through Pegasus.
However, the PSC, Ada Colau’s partner in the council, is trying to tiptoe around the wiretapping issue. Y Socialist sources deny that the City Council is going to appear. In any case, the legal services are analyzing how they should act if they finally decide to go to court.
The ‘Pegasus case’ has become another scenario in which the two government partners in Barcelona can demonstrate, ahead of next year’s elections, that they do not agree on many things. But the ‘comuns’ have another open front, in this case with ERC, because the Republican municipal leader, Ernest Maragall, seemed on Sunday to insinuate that Colau was an “accomplice” of the CNI for volunteering to be elected mayor, to stop the independence movement, with the votes of Manuel Valls. When she heard it, the mayor was outraged, and asked Maragall for a rectification.
The ERC candidate in Barcelona has already clarified that he did not want to link Colau with the CNI. The main interest of the Republicans since the case broke is something else: not “whitewash the PSC one millimeter”. And if until now this relationship between espionage and the Catalan socialists was too diffuse, for the republican taste, the CNI’s monitoring of the ERC and the ‘comuns’ negotiation in 2019 has opened the ban for the attack on the PSC, the force whom ERC considers to be the great electoral rival to beat.
For this reason, Ernest Maragall stressed this Monday that the socialist municipal leader, Jaume Collboni, “is the great beneficiary” of the interference in communications. For him, the government pact between the ‘comuns’ of Colau and the PSC, with the support of the force of Manuel Valls, is nothing more than “a state operation”.
The PSC asks Aragonès for a rectification
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And this time the one who was upset by Maragall’s words was the PSC. The PSC’s Deputy Secretary for Organisation, Lluïsa Moret, has asked the Republican leader in Barcelona to rectify her allusions to Collboni. “[Maragall] He has a long history, and he has to respect the rules of the game. Unsubstantiated accusations cannot be made,” he said.
The socialist leader has added that, if Maragall does not react, the president of the Generalitat, Pere Aragonès, would have to do so. “We ask Aragonès to make Maragall rectify. At the moment, what ERC has shown is that Barcelona doesn’t matter to them, because it has been a bargaining chip for other interests”, Moret stated in relation to the pact with the ‘comuns’ for the Generalitat’s budget in exchange for the approval of the Barcelona budget.