Only a state that has lost its sense of shame and that, without any complexes, brazenly pursues its citizens for the simple fact of being pro-independence can explain how a discredited body such as Spain's Court of Accounts is acting as a predatory institution that takes possession of people's assets and leaves them as close as possible to destitute. When this Thursday Albert Royo, who was general secretary of the Diplocat network of Catalan offices abroad between 2013 and 2017, announced that the Court of Accounts was claiming 4.5 million euros for the foreign action carried out while he was in office, it started to become clear that there is an amount of tens of millions of euros which the Spanish public auditing body wants thirty-five former senior pro-independence officials to deposit to cover their civil liability, probably at the end of June.
The list is headed by Puigdemont, Mas and Junqueras and the Court of Auditors seems determined that no one should be spared. Paradoxically, the institution setting the sentence is not even a fully-fledged court of law, as it consists of members elected by the Congress of Deputies and the Senate, mainly at the proposal of the PP and the PSOE, some of whom previously occupied positions of political responsibility. Brothers of ex-PM José María Aznar, the in-laws of Rodrigo Rato and other former ministers have all passed through there, it being accepted that the auditing carried out would have as many gaps in it as there were interests affected. And that a hundred of the 700 people that the institution employs are relatives or close associates of its members and senior officials.
The latest scandal in which the Court of Accounts is involved is the revocation of the sentence handed down to the former mayor of Madrid, Ana Botella, and city councillors on her municipal team, over the sale of 18 housing developments belonging to the Municipal Housing Company of Madrid (EMVS) to the corporate group Fidere, a real estate investment company belonging to the Blackstone fund. The acquittal was decided by two votes to one, those of two court members proposed by the PP, one of them a former minister under Aznar - husband of Ana Botella - Margarita Mariscal de Gante. The initial decision, imposing a sentence of almost 26 million euros for selling the homes below their market value to a vulture fund, was thus tossed aside.
This, then, is the body in charge of auditing the accounts of the state at its different administrative levels, and those of the political parties. Nothing good can be expected from it at a time when the rearmament of the deep state against the independence movement has been relaunched at meteoric speed. The results of the Madrid election are what they are and there is nothing like Catalonia to use as a target. Court of Accounts, pardons, ordinary courts, fines... The inventory that the Spanish state has amassed over the years is insuperable.