The National Court began the trial of the Pujol family on Monday. It did not take even half a morning for the clan’s defense to put this on the court table The whole affair has an irregular political origin which must bring the whole indictment … Against them it collapses. Villarejo, M. Rajoy, Camargue recording… Throughout the hearing, all the common areas of the case were visited and this was only before the preliminary issues were presented for the hearing that is expected to last until the spring of 2026.
If the three judges had surprised the forensic experts with their decision that the Pujol patriarch should finally sit on the bench (of course, via video and for the time being only until they see if he is fit when he has to testify in the spring), the day in the industrial area of San Fernando de Henares, where the total trial of this special court is located, was quickly directed by the defenses of members of the family that has held political power for decades in Catalonia.
The defense of Josep Pujol, led by lawyer Jaime Campaner, was the first to bring to the courtroom the idea that the case was born in 2012 with the “original sin”: an alleged political operation orchestrated by the government of Mariano Rajoy, which would have relied on the “National Police” and the arts of Commissioner José Manuel Velario to attack and discredit the Pujol family.
“There are rational indications of the participation of elements of state power in this coordination that sought to place the illicitly obtained evidence on the court table,” he explained, referring also to the fact that at the beginning, when the Public Prosecutor’s Office had no evidence against the family, there was a cover in a national newspaper in which the accounts of the Pujol family in Andorra were reflected, attributing it to a movement promoted by the police sewer network that turned into an anti-corruption demand. Sending a judicial commission to Andorra.
In the line, he pointed out that the person who was the partner of Pujols’ firstborn, María Victoria Álvarez, and whose statements to the police in December 2012 precipitated the Pujols case – the case of trips to the emirate with large sums of money – was in fact a victim of the same police operation in which Villarejo participated, and added that the case even included “short text messages” from her with the person who was the head of the presidential office. and the “popular” government of Jorge Moragas, in which he was encouraged to denounce his former partner in order to “save Spain”.
45 million in dispute
Despite the defense’s efforts to show the family as a kind of sewage victim – at times reminiscent of Pablo Iglesias’ election arguments in 2019 – the prosecutor’s indictment indicates that up to 45 million euros have been claimed from them and they face penalties ranging from 8 to 29 years in prison and large fines for crimes ranging from illicit association, money laundering and seizure of assets.
But despite this legal reality, the rest of the lawyers remained steadfast on this political thesis. Oriol’s lawyer was particularly critical of Pujol, stressing that the action taken against them from the beginning was “illegal” because Álvarez traveled to Madrid to testify before the police under “threats.” He pointed out that “in fact, he later sent a message saying that he was retracting what he said” at the police headquarters.
For this defence, there was “the will of some pseudo-policemen and part of the state apparatus to influence the action carried out in Catalonia”, and for this reason, he understood that “the talk about the Catalonia process was not trivial”: “There is talk about Morajas, as well as about Alicia Sánchez Camacho – the former president of the Catalan People’s Party -… There is a chain of events that pushes this lady to testify in court, and it is clear that she is not doing it because she wants to.”
He then lamented that there was a political process against the Pujol family, and if they had been before the National Court for “12 years” it was because of their family name. He stressed, “If they were other people or their name was Gonzalez Amador – a friend of Madrid President Isabel Díaz Ayuso – there would only be talk of exchanging documents with the public prosecutor about an alleged tax crime, but their name is Pujol and that is another case.”
Beyond that, the defense team attacked the prosecutor’s indictment as fatally incarnate, and demanded that several crimes be deleted from the case, considering them to be either prescribed or arising from scheduled violations. The session will resume on Tuesday with the rest of the previous cases, where the court must decide whether to resolve them or resolve them in a ruling.