A few months ago, the judicial investigation by the organization of the consultation of the unilateral 1-0 referendum was finished with almost 29 defendants. All that remained was to deliver the prosecutor’s indictment, which had even reached the State Attorney General’s Office for review. But last May the Court of Barcelona agreed to unify the case that was being investigated in another court on the process of internationalization of the ‘procés’ or Diplocat (opened in 2021, against charges from the governments of Artur Mas and Puigdemont), which caused the investigation to slow down. This Wednesday, the head of the Investigating Court number 13 of Barcelona has promoted this Tuesday the investigations, which include charges from the Government of Carles Puigdemont and computer scientists, with the statement of Aleix Villatoro, former secretary of Acció Exterior and current director of the Catalan Council of Sports (CCD), which has defended the legality of its actions.
Villatoro and the former general secretary of Diplocat, Albert Royo, are the two ex-charges who had requested the unification of the two criminal cases because they were in both proceedings and assured that the acts were related and judging them separately harms them. When they were summoned by the Investigating Court number 18 of Barcelona, which was in charge of the case for alleged embezzlement due to the internationalization of the ‘procés’, they accepted their right not to testify until the competition dissipated. With the unification in the Investigating Court 13, the investigations have resumed, although the judge will have to send the case back to the Barcelona Court and the prosecution will have to redraft their indictment.
The subsidy under suspicion
Villatoro is being investigated for having approved a single expense together with the ‘ex-minister’ of Foreign Affairs Raül Romeva, specifically a grant without public competition of 40,000 euros in the Federation of Internationally Recognized Catalan Organizations (FOCIR) in 2016. Romeva, which is now investigated in the court of 1-O, already declared to the investigating judge 18 (before the unification) that the subsidy granted was correct because all the technical reports endorsed it, including two opinions that accepted the non-competition, that is, that There was no need to hold an open competition because the subsidized activities could only be carried out by FOCIR, which has no equivalent entity in Catalonia.
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The former secretary of Acció Exterior has rejected in his statement before the judge that he had committed any irregularity and that the same Court of Auditors (the basis of the complaint filed by the prosecution for the internationalization of the ‘procés’) had not detected the commission of any crime in granting the subsidy to Focir. After his appearance in court, Villatoro argued that “there is no sense in pursuing some facts that are impeccable from the administrative point of view and from the democratic and political legitimization of the Government that promoted them.” In his opinion, “it is a political cause against the independence movement” that “has no legal basis.”
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