We are nine days away from the regional elections on November 25, 2012. On November 16, the leadership of the Ministry of the Interior of Jorge Fernández Díaz publishes in the newspaper The world, which was, according to the then commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, his bertha canyon, an apocryphal document attributed by journalists to the UDEF in which it was stated that the president of the Generalitat, Artur Mas, and the former president Jordi Pujol, had collected money from construction companies through the Palau de la Música plot in accounts in Switzerland and Liechtenstein, an invention of the confidant paid by the Police, the ex-convict Javier de la Rosa. The head of the UDEF, commissioner Manuel Vázquez López, denied that his department had prepared such a report. Pujol, weeks later, in an interview with Susanna Griso denied, once again, the news and added:
–I feel a little defenseless, because all this from the UDEF… What the hell is that from the UDEF? Now we still don’t know if there was a draft or not, if it was done clandestinely and illegally, or if the Ministry of the Interior authorized it.
On the occasion of the 2014 sovereign referendum, the Police and the ministry repeated a similar operation. The aforementioned medium published a non-existent account of the mayor of Barcelona, Xavier Trias, in Switzerland.
The Economic and Financial Crime Unit (UDEF), Created in 2005 and regulated by a 2013 ministerial order, it is made up of six brigades. The agents collaborate with judges, prosecutors and courts, who entrust them with investigations. They can also act as a result of complaints. The UDEF depends, together with four other investigative units, of the General Commissariat of the Judicial Police.
According to the Constitution (article 126) “the judicial police depend on the judges, the courts and the Public Prosecutor’s Office in their functions of investigation of the crime, discovery and insurance of the offender, in the terms established by law”. The Criminal Procedure Law broadly regulates the activity of the judicial police in its article 182, including the need for the approval of the judge when undercover agents are assigned and false identities are used.
Commissioner José Luis Olivera, as head of the UDEF, made this institution in his image, likeness and interests, in line with the Popular Party in the most scandalous matters.
The explosion of cases of political and financial corruption in Spain has tested laws to institutions that have not been modernized. One of them is the judicial police. The projects to update the Criminal Procedure Law sleep the sleep of the just.
“The police have always been political,” writes sociologist Alex S. Vitale, coordinator of the Police and Social Justice Project at Brooklyn College and author of the book The End of Policing, who highlights the activity of American police and intelligence against dangerous social movements for the stability of the system.
A circumstance that has been seen in the police and judicial persecution of Unidas Podemos and its main leaders since its projection in Spanish politics in 2015. A persecution aimed at criminalizing them and destroying their reputation (what the Americans call character assassination). Already in March 2016, the aforementioned Manuel Vázquez López made several calls to magistrates of the Second Chamber of the Supreme Court offering them details of a report called PISA (Pablo Iglesias Sociedad Anónima) given that they had to rule on the admission of a complaint. of the Manos Limpias union against Iglesias and Iñigo Errejón for alleged illegal financing. It was a report with newspaper clippings that lacked any serious evidence. Something similar to the report on Mas and Pujol in 2012. Beyond this type of management, it is true that the casual attitude of the head of the UDEF revealed the increasing weight of the UDEF and the UCO (Central Operative Unit of the Civil Guard) in the instruction of the summary proceedings of the National Court.
“This increasing weight has its origin in the decades of terrorism. It is the police who own and select the information, “says a magistrate with extensive experience in the investigation of investigations to EL PERIÓDICO. “They are judicial police but they depend organically on their bosses. And they do not hide the information they collect from their bosses» We have seen it in the case of the colonel of the Civil Guard Diego Pérez de los Cobos, dismissed in May 2020 and restored last July. In this case, the colonel refused to provide information to the Ministry of the Interior about a complaint against the Government delegate in Madrid following the authorization of the demonstration on the day of working women on March 8, 2020 (development of infections of the coronavirus).
The Rosell case
Related news
«The case of the ex-president of Barça Rosell is paradigmatic of a sectarian police that gives the judge and prosecutors the information that interests them and hides another. And it turns out that if they had been given all the data from the beginning, if it had been controlled impartially, they would have realized that there was no case, because everything was justified, “says the magistrate consulted. “If it is that the police reports are transferred even with errors to the indictment proceedings and to the writings of some prosecutors,” he adds.
In the last installment of this series we will address two very relevant cases in the recent history of the Spanish Judicial State. One of them is the investigation of the cause of the ‘procés’, where the judicial police represented by the Civil Guard practically take the reins of what the investigating magistrate of the Supreme Court, Pablo Llarena, did. And the second is the piece Kitchen from the Tándem-Villarejo case.