07.06.2017 - 18:22
The journalists Carlos Enrique Bayo and Patricia López made the most striking appearance yet by the Operation Catalonia commission of investigation in the Parliament. Both for some time have revealed to the Público newspaper what is hidden in the state sewers: the connections between prosecutors, magistrates, the Ministry of the Interior, the upper echelons of the police force and the large Spanish companies. Up to the Operation Catalonia, ‘the largest scandal of police and Interior Mafia corruption since the GAL’, says Bayo in this interview. We talk to him for a good hour on the telephone, during which he several times exclaims that nothing has been done despite everything he explains and everything published. ‘This would be a world scandal in any other European country!’ he says indignantly. This ‘this’ that he talks about, and which makes one’s hair stand on end, is the continuity established between the former Francoist political and social brigade and the scandals to which we are witness today.
— Tell us how the country moved from the dismantling of the Francoist police to the current sewer of the Ministry of the Interior.
— That social and political brigade was dismantled, but the principal members were neither pursued, nor investigated, nor dismissed, nor made redundant. They were compensated for their services, which we have to remember were tortures and illegal detentions during the dictatorship.
— How were the Francoist police compensated?
— With posts with impressive salaries, as security directors for the largest companies in Spain: Renfe, Iberia, the electrical companies … And even some foreign companies, which is the case of Billy el Niño, the best-known of them all, who was placed in Renault. They all knew each other and continued to meet and coordinate to create a parallel police force that protected whoever paid them. Villarejo had customers, he was the junior of the political and social brigade.
— Is that where commissioner Villarejo comes from?
— Yes. In fact, he actually said to my face, ‘I arrested your father.’ I told him it wasn’t true because we were arrested together, but it is true that afterwards he was interrogated by the Directorate General for Security, and they boasted about it. All of those people come from that brigade, and they create a parallel parapolice network that in all senses protects the multimillionaires that come from nowhere like the Russia of Yeltsin or Putin; the people who get rich with all of the privatisations, starting with Boyer and continuing with Aznar, from all of the large state companies that were privatised, including Telefònica.
— And here the conflicts start to appear.
— Through the overzealous dedication to protecting some of these millionaires. For instance, López Madrid, who is the son-in-law of Villar Mir, of OHL, investigated in the Operation Lezo, received protection from commissioner Villarejo. Villarejo took absolutely aggressive action against Dr Elisa Pinto, who had reported López Madrid for harassing her; and he not only acts against a doctor, who he wounded, but also against commissioners investigating these threats and López Madrid’s harassment of the doctor.
— Like what?
— For example, commissioner Jaime Barrado, who had been dismissed from the internal affairs unit for starting to investigate police corruption, and who was sent to Chamartín police station. It was precisely here where he received the complaints from Dr Pinto; they investigated them and came up against Villarejo, so he was dismissed again, because all of these people form an untouchable mafia.
— Who are those who participate in Villarejo’s business?
—Villarejo creates his empire. He has an office of lawyers, the whole of the 9th floor of the Torre Picasso, which is the most luxurious and most expensive building in Madrid. He has the Stuart and Mckenzie office of lawyers at the service of whoever pays best, and we already know who pays best: Adrián de la Joya, López Madrid… Villarejo was on leave for ten years, in which time he built this empire, and when he went back to the police, they immediately made him a commissioner.
— What else has Villarejo got in this empire?
—Apart from the lawyers’ office, Schola Iuris, which is an institute of legal studies through which active prosecutors and magistrates have passed. He has also created detective agencies and has accounts in tax havens … And all of this done by a commissioner who apparently lives on nothing, who has the salary of an inspector. Well he ends up raising this empire of forty companies and twenty-five million euros declared, and that is just the tip of the iceberg, who knows what he has hidden in tax havens. This is only what is seen.
— No-one from the state does anything against it?
— The police internal affairs unit made a report as a result of Eugenio Pino’s commission to find out where this empire had come from. And in the report, the prosecution was specifically called on to investigate where the fund had come from, because the investigators said that it was very suspicious, that it came from money laundering and possibly from reserve funds too. They sent this to the anticorruption office, which picked up on it but was scalded as soon as it saw it and sent it to the office of the senior prosecution of Madrid (by the way, Manuel Moix was senior prosecutor of Madrid and when he left, he left his right-hand man there …). Well in Madrid, this report, with a very serious content because it talked about police corruption in the higher echelons of the force, is left in a drawer, which is locked and thrown into the Manzanares river. And a year later, it is still in the drawer.
— Incredible.
— This is a very serious crime, because it amounts to the omission of the senior prosecution of Madrid to pursue crimes. Let it be pursued by rota! Oh obviously this man made no tweets against Carrero Blanco!
— They protect each other.
— Now Manuel Moix has gone, hasn’t he? Well the Schola Iuris, Mr Villarejo’s school, saw the likes of Manuel Moix, and Mr Maza, the general state prosecutor. Come on! Other students also included Manuel Marchena, the magistrate of the Supreme Court criminal section! And what do they do to those who are not intimidated? They give them rises that they cannot reject, so Arturo Zamarriego, the judge in the case of Nicolás, was raised to the provincial audience; judge Eloy Velasco was promoted to a new appeals court at the audience, which is the most powerful … And they did so when they said: this bloke has to stop investigating.
— So we can’t expect anything to change then.
— Just look at Manuel Moix’s curriculum. In this article with the title ‘The [Spanish] government assaults the prosecution for braking the investigations into police corruption’ I have published very serious things, but nobody has reacted, it is all silence. It is the law of silence, the mafia in a pure state; but the mafia includes magistrates, prosecutors, the Minister of Justice and the Spanish Prime Minister! It would be a world scandal in any other European country. Manuel Moix, three times covered up [the former president of the community of Madrid] Ignacio González to stop his case going forward, before it finally reached the anticorruption office. When he was senior prosecutor of Madrid, he covered up and prevented all investigation into the reports against Ignacio González and the Canal de Isabel II. He even came into line with the entrepreneur Flores, a friend of Ana Botella, in the case of Madrid Arena. Five seventeen-year-old girls died there! And the prosecutor responsible for the case helped the entrepreneur responsible for that horrible occurrence; these are this man’s merits. But there are a lot more: he opposed the disclosure of Blesa’s mails, which gave rise to the scandal of the illegal ‘black’ credit cards…
— And now he resigns, but he returns to the Supreme Court prosecution …
— That’s right! And he will earn 118,000 euros a year, a better salary even than now. It’s a huge scandal.
— It is the state working. How can the state work against itself?
— There is not even the chance of trusting that some media will report it, because they have managed to ensure that these large companies and financial institutions that were privatised and given to people like Villalonga (in the case of Telefónica) have taken over all the large media, so none are going to report this. Now because there are still networks … It is an alliance, where the Ministry of the Interior takes a part, an alliance that includes the police and information services, the civil guard; the prosecution, completely controlled and hierarchically obedient to the orders of the executive; also a large part of the judiciary; they control the General Council of Judicial Powers, the body that makes the appointments; and obviously they have the economic power, and the political …
— There are journalists who are very directly involved in the case of the state sewers.
— There is a document signed by Mr Villarejo in 1995, of a dozen typed pages, in which he says he has a lot of journalists infiltrated in the media. In the case of El Mundo, where there were Manuel Cerdán, Esteban Urreiztieta, Eduardo Inda, Antonio Rubio, he said he had made the headers appear on Monday’s front page. And he says it just like that. If in 1995, you already controlled the headers of the most important newspaper that bombed scandals, well now they control all of the large media, and we are not talking about radio or television. None of this has been tried, it hasn’t reached even one duty judge. And when the investigation commission is activated in Congress for the Operation Catalonia, PP, PSOE and Ciutadans veto the appearance of those who should know how the recordings of Fernández Díaz were made, how they filtered …
— Why are Ciutadans backing the PP and PSOE, in this case?
— They said they would act like the majority. Amazing! They, the spearhead of the fight against corruption! We are talking about the most important case of political corruption that has been committed in Europe, and they abstain. And if the majority says something, they will accept it, what is this all about? They have used all kinds of subterfuge to prevent the investigation going forward.
— But is Ciutadans a party involved? You publish the case of the wedding of the relative of Fuster Fabra that Albert Rivera had attended and where he brought the senior echelons of the police into contact with those of the BPA to get information on the Pujols.
—Yes, Albert Rivera got very angry with me, because he said he hadn’t been at the reception. Well what a surprise that he wasn’t there, when there are photographs of him with the wives of the two commissioners, Eugenio Pino and Marcelino Martín Blas, taken at the table. It’s rather a strange way of not being there.
— And obviously Fuster Fabra, strongly connected to Ciutadans, was also there.
— He is also very angry with me because I said he was an extreme right-wing lawyer.
— Yes, we have that written in VilaWeb.
— Yes, he says it was a sin of his youth … The fact that he was a militant of Fuerza Nueva doesn’t mean he was not extreme right-wing, of course.
— From what you say, Ciutadans, through Fuster Fabra, played a mediating role with the senior echelons of the police force.
—Yes, Fuster Fabra mediated between the Ciercos [former directors of Banca Privada d’Andorra] and the political leadership, and he did so to ensure the dealings to be able to reveal the Pujols’ accounts in Andorra, and that is unquestionable. It is unquestionable that Fuster Fabra is one of the godfathers of Ciutadans, but they deny the obvious here.
— In the Operation Catalonia. Why did they propitiate the dinner at La Camarga in 2010 between Sánchez Camacho and Victoria Álvarez?
—Vicky Álvarez came down from Andorra once with Jordi Pujol Ferrusola and 25,000 euros, not with half a million. And when he left her, she thought she would get something out of having been his lover. She looked for a way to earn money out of it and this is where Mr Villarejo comes in, who relates with her as a journalist of El Mundo, with the backing of the journalists Eduardo Inda and Esteban Urreiztieta. In the audios there are between Álvarez and Villarejo (still pretending to be a journalist from El Mundo), they talk about Jorge Moragas [Mariano Rajoy’s head of bureau].
— Well, Jorge Moragas!
— Yes, you already know that he knew Sánchez Camacho because they studied together when they were young. And Moragas tells Camacho that this girl he knew from school has been the Pujol’s oldest son’s lover, that she has a lot to say and it could go really well to destroy the Pujols’ reputation, and he tells her to meet her. Álvarez goes to the PP headquarters in Barcelona, and when they begin to talk in Camacho’s office, they arranged to meet over dinner one day. And it is then when Camacho organises the dinner at La Camarga with the famous recording. I have evidence that Camacho has committed perjury in court and has made a false complaint and lied in parliament, and now she is the first vice president of the Spanish Congress.
— And the La Camarga recording, does it end up two years in a drawer?
—No, it is examined, and the UDEF is created, at the head of which they put José Luís Olivera, who is now the director of a body that combines the fight against tourism with the fight against organised crime. Olivera directed the UDEF before Fernández Díaz was Ministry of the Interior, we are talking about the time of Rubalcaba. But then they still did not have the necessary power to make a political brigade to act against the Catalan parties and politicians, but the UDEF dossiers were already being drawn up. Who was Olivera’s right-hand man? Well Villarejo, who was then looking for a way to make Victoria Álvarez and also Javier de la Rosa declare against the Pujols. And in the case of De la Rosa, Villarejo did so by pretending to be a lawyer and sending him Petit Nicolás. We published the recording of De la Rosa talking to Petit Nicolás. And all of this was done in preparing the first report of the UDEF.
— And this happens because of the outbreak of independentism in Catalonia.
— Obviously. The rise of independentism in Catalonia is seen as a threat from the general commission of information in Madrid, and from the associate operative directorate of the police. So they examine what can be done and start the dossiers, which are made public when Fernández Díaz is in the ministry and says go on, let’s sink them. This is why Daniel de Alfonso goes to talk with him. They look for anything to try to sink the Catalan sovereigntist politicians and have to do so before the 9-N, and publish it in the favourable press. This is all obvious in the audios.
— Do you think it is comparable with the GAL?
— It is the largest scandal of police corruption and Interior mafia since the GAL, that is obvious. It is comparable in the execution, in the objectives, in everything corrupt about democracy. The difference is obviously that the GAL committed murder, and this brigade hasn’t yet. They also learned from the GAL. If two bodies appear, that’s not good, but at the same time they did threaten us with ‘We will not hold back.’
— What you think they might do when Catalonia calls the referendum?
— The most serious thing about the sewer is that it is not just the Ministry of the Interior. Because you always have a legal apparatus to come down on your side, which can protect and defend you. If there are investigations into Xavier Trias which are seen to be false and are archived … The most dangerous thing is that the sewer pollutes the judicial system, and in this case I see that
