The lawyer Gonzalo Boye, responsible for the defence of Josep Lluís Alay in the Volhov case, accuses Barcelona Investigative Court No 1 - that is, the court headed by judge Joaquín Aguirre, - of leaking confidential details which fed the journalistic information used to allege a "Russian plot" linked to the Catalan independence process. Boye has presented a forceful argument on this matter and asserts that, given the seriousness of the facts, the case should be reassigned and investigated by another court.
At the end of January, Aguirre extended the investigation period for one of the parts of the Volhov case on independence process funding: specifically, the section that links Catalan president-in-exile Carles Puigdemont to the alleged Russian conspiracy in the process. In his resolution, the judge argued that on December 28th, 2023, he had received an anonymous letter containing press clippings of stories by an international team of journalists explaining that Puigdemont had received an emissary from the Russia president, Vladimir Putin, a few hours before the Catalan independence declaration was voted on, on 27th October 2017 in the Catalan Parliament.
Leaked to "third parties" outside the case
The submission of Gonzalo Boye denounces that the source of this journalistic information was the content of the mobile phone of another person investigated in the case, Víctor Tarradellas, whose mobile phone was confiscated on May 24th, 2018, at the time of his arrest, following an investigation into subsidies from the Barcelona Provincial Council. It details that after the Civil Guard extracted the contents of the phone and handed it over to the court, "an exact copy of the data" was provided by the court to "third parties unrelated to the case", who examined the contents. An international consortium of journalists then published confidential information extracted from the cellphone, "offering their own interpretation of the data", which ended up being sent back to the court in anonymous letters.
The conclusion of Boye's writ is that "using public funds, the court developed the theory of the alleged Russian plot based on these anonymous letters", while the court decisions have been fuelling the media coverage of this alleged intervention from people close to Putin. Alay's defence lawyer considers that, given the seriousness of the facts, which "can be presumed to constitute several crimes", the case will need to be sent to the Dean's Court of Barcelona so that another court can investigate, identify the perpetrators and establish the corresponding responsibilities. "This same court cannot be the one to investigate the facts", he stresses.
Further anonymous letters to court
Throughout the writ, the lawyer points out that the anonymous letter on which the court is based is "probably not as anonymous as we are led to believe", but it is also not the first time that such actions have occurred, given that on January 23rd, 2020, the same court received an anonymous letter/complaint - which in reality, as Boye set out, is easily traceable, given that it had a sender - about activities of people of Russian origin in Barcelona. He recalls that, from this first anonymous letter, which includes documentation from the so-called Panama Papers, "delirium began to build" about possible links of the independence movement with the Russian government, although the letter does not provide "any tangible, minimally rational connection".
The complaint details that Tarradellas's phone was seized on May 24th, 2018, when he was arrested as part of the investigation into the misuse of subsidies from the Barcelona Provincial Council; that a year later, in May 2019, the Civil Guard was commissioned to analyze its content; and that in August of that year, a report was issued in which two conversations were stressed, which had nothing to do with the case, but could have constituted a crime. Despite not being actions related to the investigation, the court continued the investigation in the same procedure - "as if this were legal and possible", the writ says. With these conversations, a separate second part of the investigation was opened.
Putin (allegedly) appears
"Mysteriously, and following what would appear to be a previously laid-out incrimination plan, it is from the analysis of these conversations that, for the first time, reference appears to a series of alleged contacts with potential envoys of Russian president Vladimir Putin", adds the text, which includes the text from the Civil Guard which discussed the alleged offer of Russian support to the pro-independence parties, with financing through cryptocurrencies and the sending of soldiers, although it was not possible to identify who was behind these alleged contacts.
It is from here that, as he adds, the procedure of "anonymous allegations based on press articles" begins to be promoted, based on confidential data from the proceedings originating from Tarradellas's phone and which, as such, had their origin in the same court; and from which "this court builds an astonishing prosecution relating to an alleged Russian plot."
Leaking of confidential data
The submission made by Gonzalo Boye denounces that on March 21st, 2021, the contents of the files were leaked and makes a detailed analysis of the data, including the HASH file of the disk - which records the police intervention, and serves to certify that the files have not been manipulated. All of this, according to the writ, "authenticates, unequivocally, that this is an exact copy of the copy made by the UDEF financial crimes police unit in August 2018, which includes the entire contents of the phone, with calendar, agenda contacts, calls, messages, and locations, among other things.
Boye adds that, "astonishingly as it may seem", all this content was in the hands of an international consortium of journalists, who published the results of their investigations in May 2022, this being part of the material that was received with the anonymous letters, from which the court has structured "this amazing investigation".
"The journalistic 'information', on which several published articles and these court proceedings are based, contains a series of information, chats and photographs that have been conclusively shown to have been extracted from the aforementioned disk storing the entire contents of the phone confiscated from Mr Tarradellas," the text concludes, referring to the affirmations made by the police information itself, which cites nearly 200 pages of messages from this mobile that are part of the investigation and publishes photographs contained on the device.