It has been 17 years now since in the hemicycle of the Parliament of Catalonia that «You have a problem, and that problem is called 3%» by Pasqual Maragall addressed to Artur Mas. Throughout this period, several cases have been filed through the courts in which illegal financing practices, private enrichment, tax evasion or obtaining contracts in exchange for commissions were revealed (all of them ultimately, regardless of the beneficiary , to the detriment of public coffers and the democratic health of the country). Some already with a conviction (the cases of the Palau de la Música, the ITV contracts, the Pretoria case) and others pending trial (the Pujol case and that of the 3%). From this last mother cause on the financing of CDC in the form of commissions, a new investigation has now emerged that seeks to find out if payments made by Ibex companies to an audiovisual production company, Triacom, did not correspond to real services (or proportional to the invoiced amount), if that company channeled those resources to the benefit of Convergència Democràtica, if these economic contributions had as consideration the obtaining of public contracts and if that company, in addition, received unjustifiable public financing . Each of these four alleged irregularities can be proven or not and is likely to constitute fraudulent actions or crimes. The indications are sufficient to justify that they be investigated, and only the information obtained during the investigation and verified in court will allow a verdict to be reached and prove or not whether one or the other have unlawful cause-effect relationships.
The suspicious payments investigated by the judge from reports from the Mossos and the Civil Guard (not of dossiers on ethereal bases concocted by patriotic policemen to be handled as a weapon of ‘lawfare’) were produced between 2009 and 2013. Dynamics entrenched during the two decades of Pujolismo, or that affected a town hall with a socialist mayor like that of Sabadell, continued to be active beyond that first call of attention on February 24, 2005, just as they did after that first Treball case that It affected Union. It would take years for the political spaces in which these practices prospered to see themselves in the obligation to mutate their identity, financially and politically mortgaged, although some names may only have passed from the engine room to the back room. A decade was made to wait for the recognition on the part of Jordi Pujol of his family’s deposits in Andorra. Perhaps corruption is “inseparable” to public life, as Lluís Prenafeta affirms before the cameras, but only impunity allows it to grow and multiply. Silence is the first condition for this to be possible. And not to be tied by him, something that was not achieved in due time before figures like that of the previous monarch, a hygienic obligation.