After reading and rereading Cristóbal Montoro's statements this Monday in which he expresses with clear decisiveness that the 1st October Catalan referendum was not paid for with public money, Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena has two options: immediately summons the treasury minister as a witness to confirm in court what he's said, or release on bail, with the greatest speed possible, the Catalan political prisoners held in Madrid prisons. At the same time as all that, he has to do something else: modify all the European arrest warrants being considered in Belgium, Germany, the United Kingdom and Switzerland, since the crime of misuse of public funds didn't happen. In this case, the minister isn't reporting hearsay since, although the suspension of Catalan autonomy via article 155 of the Spanish Constitution happened several weeks after the referendum, his ministry had already taken control of the Catalan government's finances from mid-September.
Unfortunately, none of that will happen given that what is at stake here isn't a struggle for the truth, but another to impose a narrative in public opinion. As Javier Pérez Royo, professor of Constitutional Law at the University of Sevilla, has asked with clear intent, is judge Llarena the independent judge defined in the Constitution or has he split from the law to become the capricious judge who has decided they're not subject to the Constitution. And he continues: what law is the investigating judge going to justify his ruling on? Something unexpected -or not- has come up for Llarena and the case has started to fall apart where, surely, he least expected. What misuse of public funds can be discussed if public money hasn't been spent on the referendum? Blimey, it sounds like a joke to say that you can commit the crime of misuse of public funds and earn a sentence of up to twelve years in prison for the expenses deriving from opening a series of public centres for voting that day, or for the electricity that might have been used.
Minister Montoro, surely looking for his defence as the person in charge of the economic management of the Catalan government, has given a very important boost to the whole Catalan cause. You can say that months ago he had already made comments in this vein but, telling the truth, now he's had more than enough time to get through to the very last of the taken over Catalan government's papers. The result of his investigations, however, hasn't changed. We have to trust that in the case of president Puigdemont, for example, and now the German courts have already discounted the crime of rebellion, that defence lawyers will be able to produce such an interesting fact. Although the unpredictable Montoro often does his own thing -his biography is full of examples- he's not a novice politician and doesn't often say what he doesn't want to. The reason is what doesn't have an apparent explanation.