At 13:49 yesterday, May 14, the trial against the Pujol family and nine businessmen who allegedly paid them commissions in exchange for public works was submitted for judgment. 38 oral hearing sessions, in which more than 200 witnesses and experts have appeared. The trial closes 3,685 days after the visit of Victoria Álvarez, Jordi Pujol Ferrusola’s ex-lover, to the Canillas police complex, accompanied by the “patriotic police,” in which she explains that she saw with her own eyes how Pujol Ferrusola carried bags of cash to Andorra. It is December 13, 2012. The police investigation that started then, which was halted until El Mundo published seventeen months later information about the Pujol accounts in Banca Privada d’Andorra (BPA) allegedly obtained by the Spanish police, ended with the entire family charged, as well as ten businessmen; since the hearing began last November, one of them, Carles Vilarrubí, passed away, and former president Pujol was exonerated for health reasons. The rest await sentencing, possibly at the end of July, according to legal sources. All the accused plead not guilty. About 200 hours of oral hearing have not cleared many of the case’s doubts.
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Has corruption been proven?
For the defenses, the “lack of evidence” is glaring. The prosecutor admitted not having had during the investigation or among the witnesses a businessman who denounced that the Pujols, or Jordi Pujol Ferrusola, the main accused, demanded commissions in exchange for being awarded public works contracts. There is also no documentation to prove it. The case has been overshadowed by the syllogism that if Pujol Ferrusola was paid by company X and company X did public works for the Generalitat of CiU, it was thanks to the eldest son. Among the documentation, there are invoices between him and some companies. But not always: they trusted him, he said, and with many the agreement was “verbal.” No one has questioned in the trial that the Pujols hid large amounts of money in Andorra. The prosecutor estimated their wealth at 38 million euros.
Is the ‘deixa’ thesis credible?
When the case broke out in July 2014, Jordi Pujol i Soley admitted that for years he had money abroad, from an inheritance from his father. In the El Mundo report of July 2014, 3.4 million euros appear, from Marta Ferrusola and four of her children. In the trial, the eldest explained that in 1990, when the youngest, Oleguer, was already 18 years old, he gathered them all and explained that since 1980 they had a good nest egg in Andorra for each of them, and that between that year and 2004 he distributed it, as the different investments matured. When the eldest was questioned about the increase in money, he replied several times “financial sheets.” The deixa would have been invested with great success, because it multiplied more or less by ten between 1980 and 2004; an expert (on the defense side) recalled that there were two devaluations of the peseta in between. The eldest said his way of acting was to move the funds: “People keep a corner, I don’t, I move it.” Businessman Luis Delso, president of the company Isolux-Corsan, described his friend Pujol i Ferrusola as an “excited electron” who never stopped looking for business all over the world. He had them in Spain, Mexico, Gabon, Argentina… In his years as a businessman, he made between 20,000 and 25,000 bank transactions, said the eldest.
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What is Jordi Pujol i Soley’s involvement?
The former president was exonerated from the case on April 27: he was summoned to the National Court and the court concluded that he was not in a condition to defend himself, given his age. According to the Prosecutor’s thesis, reiterated and expanded in the final conclusions report, Pujol and his wife, Marta Ferrusola, who died in 2014, were the leaders of a “criminal organization,” in which the children were on a second level and the accused businessmen just below: this is new in the procedure, where no accused businessman is charged with this crime. The former president’s name, in any case, has appeared very little in these 38 days. His eldest son assured that the account he had in his name in Andorra was intended to protect the money during his divorce from Mercè Gironès. Jordi Pujol Ferrusola admitted, however, that he acted as the “driver” of his mother’s letters to Andorra. The “missals,” in the terminology she invented.
Was it a political operation?
It is a thesis that has hovered over the trial and in which the defenses have not dwelled too much. The case starts with Victoria Álvarez, who collaborated and was paid by the patriotic police. She herself admitted it. It could have been a cause for nullity from the start, but that route might have led nowhere, because the Pujols indeed had a lot of money in Andorra. At the beginning of the trial, the president of the court, José Ricardo de Prada, –who yesterday, at the end of the hearing, apologized for the “Stakhanovite” pace of the statements, with his frequent warnings about the length of the interrogations– accepted that five members of the patriotic police attend, who rambled about the facts and blurred their roles. Former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo notes about Álvarez, on July 2, 2012: “Month’s delivery and expenses.” The woman had initially been summoned by a defense, but this was withdrawn. The second fuse of the case is the publication in El Mundo. Who leaked it? How did the police obtain the information that the Pujols had that money? It is recorded, and he testified at the trial, that the CEO of BPA, Joan Pau Miquel, was coerced to reveal whether BPA had accounts of Artur Mas, Oriol Junqueras, and Jordi Pujol. Miquel was invited to meet several times in Madrid with a police agent (he was Marcelino Martín-Blas), but he denied having handed over that information. The truth is that it was published and destroyed the prestige of Jordi Pujol i Soley. His political heirs have recently tried to restore the image of the former president, who turns 96 on June 9.
Many days he asks his children when it is his turn to go to Madrid to testify.
