The Catalan government will, in the end, be able to use the Complementary Risk Fund that it created to cover the 5.4 million-euro bonds which the Spanish public auditing tribunal, the Court of Accounts, is claiming from former senior government officials. It will do so through the Catalan Institute of Finance (ICF), as provided for in the decree law passed by the Pere Aragonès executive.
The deadline for depositing the massive amounts expires at midnight on Wednesday night and the minister had announced yesterday during the post-cabinet meeting press conference that the government had not yet found any bank willing to enter into the operation.
Giró had advised - yesterday - that for the time being "out of prudence and to protect all the ICF personnel" he would avoid using this route provided for in the decree law.
Request from the ICF
However, the minister announced this morning in Parliament, in response to a question from the Junts deputy Elsa Artadi on the new credit rating achieved by the Catalan government, that in the last few hours the executive has received calls from the ICF asking him to try to use the additional provision of the decree law that provides for the entry of the Catalan Institute of Finance into the operation. “And that’s what we’re going to do,” he asserted.
Giró announced that he had addressed the issue this morning with president Pere Aragonès, and that they had agreed to implement the measure, "with the generosity of the people at the ICF and the prudence that experience recommends" .
Solidarity Fund
The 34 former government members and senior officials from whom the Court of Accounts is demanding the 5.4 million euro sum, attributing responsibility to them for having used foreign policy ministry money to promote the independence process between 2011 and 2017, had been readying themselves to face the demands on their own.
This morning in an interview with Catalunya Ràdio, the head of the pro-independence Solidarity Fund, Josep Cruanyes, had explained that the fund had managed to collect 1,200,000 euros to help cover the bail bond.
Rating of the Generalitat
Artadi's question to the minister in Parliament related to the return of the Generalitat of Catalonia to the markets after the Fitch agency had raised the Generalitat's rating by two levels.
“I was surprised that some foreign media as well as some from home tried to water down the good news, mixing it with issues of the pardons and other matters, which appear in the first paragraph, and they didn’t see the importance of trusting the economy and the strengths of this country," he retorted.
In the main image, Councilor Jaume Giró during the speech to the plenary / ACN