Jordi Pujol left Catalonia speechless on the evening of July 25, 2014. In a short writing, the former president of the Generalitat declared that his family had hidden assets in an Andorra bank from the Treasury for more than three decades. The confession was, for many and especially for those who had faithfully voted for him and venerated him as the father of the country, a disappointment of the kind that chills the soul; For others it was the confirmation of a suspicion. In addition to dividing Catalan society, the mea culpa pronounced by Pujol had two immediate effects: it buried the public image of one of the most important figures in contemporary Spanish politics and activated the judicial machine to its maximum power, which went beyond the contours of that act of contrition: not only did Pujol and his family have undeclared money abroad, but that money was the result of political corruption.
What is at stake from Monday at the National Court, after a process lasting more than a decade, is something more than a trial against a family saga and a dozen entrepreneurs: it is judging a long period of democratic Catalonia and a way of understanding the relationships between business, power and family. Regardless of whether Pujol, 95, finally faces trial or is cleared at the first hearing due to his state of health, the outcome will shape how his long tenure (1980-2003) at the helm of the Generalitat is interpreted. The magistrates will decide whether those 23 years were marked by corruption in the public administration (the source of the Pujols’ enrichment, according to the Prosecutor’s Office), or whether the Andorran wealth was the result of a Sin committed in the personal or family sphere, without contaminating (beyond non-payment of taxes) the public service provided.
To understand the The Pujol casewhich is judged over more than 50 sessions until the spring of 2026, we must return to the declaration as those who return to read the classics. Him former president He claimed that the money accumulated by his wife and children (never by himself, according to the confession) came from an inheritance that his father, Florenci Pujol, had left abroad in case, in the midst of the democratic transition, things went wrong and his people needed financial help. That legacy (deixain Catalan), of which the family was unable to provide any documentary evidence, has been the subject of a thousand debates and speculations. The point is that neither the judge who investigated the case nor the Prosecutor’s Office believe that it is real or, at least, that it is the (total or partial) origin of the assets: the money, they insist, comes from political corruption, even if this statement is not supported by direct evidence because no public tenders have been reported or contested.
The legal case, thousands of pages long, is complex, at times even obscure. But the essential thing is more or less easy to say: it is a question of verifying whether the family took advantage of its “privileged position” of power in Catalonia to enrich itself through the collection of commissions in exchange for public sentences in the administrations controlled by the defunct Convergència Democratica of Catalunya (CDC). The main actor in the collection of these alleged biteswho would then have been distributed among the family members would have been, again according to the prosecution, the eldest son, Jordi Pujol Ferrusola, who risks a request for 25 years in prison, much higher than that of his father (nine) and his brothers. The reality is that the accused entrepreneurs paid generous sums to the eldest son for alleged services that, in many cases, were not proven.
But to say that the origin of The Pujol case It was the confession of the former nationalist president, i.e. a half-truth. The family home had begun to collapse a year and a half earlier Junioralias of the firstborn. His lover, Victoria Álvarez, explained in court that she had seen him carrying bags full of cash up and down Andorra and that it all seemed very suspicious to her. That testimony led to the opening of proceedings in the National Tribunal which ended up incorporating Pujol’s confession and bringing together the investigation against the family. It later became known that Álvarez was far from being an impartial witness: she received a salary from confidential state funds.
Eager to find sensitive material to discredit a president which was beginning to show secessionist tendencies, and with the processes independence movement in a dangerous take-off phase, the so-called patriotic police were a key element in an investigation that the family experienced more like a lynching. The poisoning of state sewers will also be in the process, and it’s possible that Álvarez herself will be as well. Neither the prosecutor’s office nor the defense want to listen to the uncomfortable testimony of the woman who was the first architect of the case, despite having been summoned to testify at the couple’s request. Junior.
Pujol trial without Pujol?
As often happens with Spanish justice, Pujol’s trial comes too late; in part, due to the family’s resources and maneuvers to delete sensitive documentation unrelated to the investigation from the summary. Along the way, the former president lost his wife, Marta Ferrusola (who was exonerated because she suffered from Alzheimer’s and died in July last year) and also lost his health. He is now a frail and weak elderly man, whom the court’s forensic experts consider incapable of facing criminal proceedings due to the cognitive impairment he suffers from. The magistrates will listen to him this Monday by video conference from Barcelona, they will question the forensic experts and make a decision. If he is acquitted for this reason, Pujol will no longer run the risk of being convicted, but nor will he have the possibility of being acquitted.
The most likely thing is that Pujol will be removed from a trial which, according to his relatives, he would have liked to undergo. From the point of view of former presidentthe hearing is the last phase of a penance that has come to be exposed in a book, Between pain and hope. Published in 2021, coinciding with the moment in which the investigating judge opened the oral proceedings against him, his seven children and 11 other people, the work is a sort of political testament in which the president asks that the “stain” of Andorra not dirty what really matters: its political legacy.
Pujol’s request has been answered and today, awaiting a sentence that strengthens or weakens his figure, it can be said that he has been generously rehabilitated. Or, to use the religious vocabulary so dear to him, “forgiven”, both by a part of Catalan society and by the political class. His last great supporter is the current tenant of the Palau which he occupied for many years, the socialist Salvador Illa. Claimant and to some extent continuer of the work of Pujolism, Illa received it with all honors and questioned the advisability of pursuing it due to his fragile health.
It hasn’t always been this way. After the confession, Pujol became a pest, a pariah. He renounced all the advantages that were due to him as former president of the Generalitat. He took refuge from the ugly faces first in his house in Cerdanya, in the Catalan Pyrenees; later, in a rented office in the Eixample of Barcelona, where he discreetly received visits from personalities with whom he chatted about the human and the divine. He was showing his head. He began attending public events where he was no longer booed, and in February 2022, months after the book’s publication, he attended an official event on Europe together with all his successors.
Taken with a certain normality, stain An Andorran, Pujol will surely enter the history books, an obsession that has always accompanied him. It is likely that the former president be exempted. But the trial will also account for the facts concerning him and his family. And the outcome of the trial, with or without his presence, will depend on whether that stain will be highlighted in the first paragraph of his biography as evidence that he was a corrupt politician, or will remain an inconvenient footnote.
