The so-called Operation Catalonia – the alleged maneuvers of the police sectors to torpedo the processes independence activist: it didn’t take him two hours to show up at the trial against the Pujol clan. The family of former president Jordi Pujol wanted to highlight, during the first hearing of the hearing on the origin of his hidden assets, the extent to which the intervention of state sewers may have contaminated the case. Lawyers for Josep Pujol and Oriol Pujol, two of the president’s seven children (all defendants), have asked for much of the trial to be quashed because some evidence was obtained “illicitly.” Everything is tainted by “provenance”, they point out, and not even the former regional leader’s confession in July 2014 was “free and voluntary”: according to the defense, he was only trying to circumvent the data that was beginning to circulate on the family’s bank accounts in Andorra and which had been obtained through pressure and blackmail.
The incidence of the so-called patriotic police in it The Pujol case is, at this point, beyond any doubt. With the belief (which later turned out to be wrong) that the ending a pater patriae of the Catalans would have shot down the processesseveral police officers targeted the family in the era of Jorge Fernández Díaz (PP) as Interior Minister. And along the way they crossed some red lines. Even some of his maneuvers have already been declared proven in a definitive judicial sentence – the Supreme Court confirmed in 2025 the one-year prison sentence for Eugenio Pino, head of the National Police at the time of Mariano Rajoy, for having “illicitly” stolen Jordi Pujol Ferrusola’s data and attempting to introduce them into this summary which is now being examined by the Court.
The problem for the Pujols is that they had a secret to hide: a million dollar fortune in Andorra, hidden from the treasury (and citizens) for more than three decades, which they regularized only after the newspaper The world published screenshots of these filings on July 7, 2014. “Everything is summed up in this image,” said Jaime Campaner, Josep Pujol Ferrusola’s lawyer, as he held the newspaper’s cover that day.
Those financial data forced the former presidentargued the lawyer, to release the statement saying that his father, Florenci Pujol, had left money to his family when he died in 1980 in case his political career took a wrong turn. The judicial proceedings were formally opened after the confession, but the confession (“vague, generic, imprecise”) was “a mere pretext”: the origin was the banking data, obtained “illicitly”, through pressure from the state sewers on the managers of the Private Banking of Andorra (BPA), as the retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, among others, said in public. “It is the original sin” and, therefore, the letters rogatory to the country of the Pyrenees and everything that was obtained subsequently are null, this lawyer argued in the first hearing of the trial.
An inconvenient witness
The first attack against the Pujols had actually begun much earlier, in December 2012, with the declaration of a woman. Victoria Álvarez, who had been the lover of her eldest son, Jordi Pujol Ferrusola, said that during her relationship with him she had seen him carrying backpacks full of 500 euro notes between Catalonia and Andorra. The education of The Pujol case has gotten longer and many things have happened (such as the rise and decline of processes) that time allowed us to discover that Álvarez was not an impartial witness: she would have received a monthly salary from the reserved funds of the State. His statement led to investigations at the National Court which ended up absorbing the case opened by Pujol’s confession. Now she is an inconvenient witness: neither the prosecutor’s office nor the Pujol defense called her to testify, even though the ex-wife of their eldest son did.
The lawyer of Oriol Pujol, the only son who followed his father’s political career until his conviction for corruption (in ITV case), highlighted this “illicit start” of the trial, born “from the desire of some pseudo-policemen and part of the state apparatus to influence what was happening in Catalonia”. “It is clear that (Victoria Álvarez) does not make (the statement) because she wants to,” said lawyer Francesc Sánchez, who asked for the inclusion of new evidence: the documentation of the criminal proceedings followed in Andorra regarding Operation Catalonia.
In addition to the pressure on BPA and Victoria Álvarez’s statement, the incidence of patriotic police It is based on a third leg: the theft of Jordi Pujol Ferrusola’s personal and financial data by unknown persons who ended up in the hands of the police. Last February the Supreme Court confirmed the one-year prison sentence of Eugenio Pino, deputy director of the Police under the PP. Pino ordered to record such data in a USB stick and hand them over to the unit that was investigating the family.
But, no matter how long it has existed, Operation Catalonia is unlikely to save the Pujols. The requested annulments, according to litigation sources, have little experience. First of all because the court has already endorsed the investigating judge’s actions; and secondly, because the investigation reached the same conclusions with different means of evidence. The Prosecutor’s Office, which does not believe in reality deixa (inheritance) of his grandfather, believes that the man who governed the Generalitat between 1980 and 2003 took advantage of his position of power to enrich himself and his family with political corruption: the awarding of public works in exchange for commissions.
Regardless of what the ruling says on the matter, it was important for the Pujols that Operation Catalonia come to light in the trial, as it gives them a portrait closer to that of the victim than that of the accused. This too is proof of the story, of the truth that will be established in the established facts, a true obsession of a Pujol who, at 95 years old, thinks more about history books than about the possibility of a prison sentence.
