That the ex-prime minister of the Spanish government Mariano Rajoy was not ignorant about the activities of Operation Catalonia is increasingly clear. In January, ElNacional.cat had access to new documents and audios related to the persecution to which Catalan politicians and businesspeople were subjected, using public resources, in an illegal attempt to discredit the independence movement. As this newspaper explained, then-police commissioner José Manuel Villarejo informed the then-undersecretary for security, Francisco Martínez, right-hand man of interior minister Jorge Fernández Díaz, of the illicit investigations they were carrying out against Catalan politicians, with the payment of informants, according to the conversations recorded by the police. The memos travelled through different offices of the PP government. Minister Fernández Díaz received them and sent them on to prime minister Rajoy, as ElNacional.cat learned from sources involved in these actions. Now, radio programme El món a RAC1 has had access to a secret report from the Spanish interior ministry which confirms that the Spanish PM was informed about the actions being taken in the "sewers of the state".
The title of the document, which has not seen the light of day until now, is revealing: "Secret note for the Prime Minister about sensitive information from Catalonia." According to the radio station, in one and a half pages, it summarizes the operations that the so-called patriotic police unit were running at that time to stop the independence movement and harm the Spanish opposition parties, who at that time were led by the Socialists (PSOE).
According to the document metadata, the author is Francisco Martínez, who in 2012 was Fernández Díaz's number two and, as ElNacional.cat has already explained, acted as the link between José Manuel Villarejo and the political leadership of the ministry. Martínez was therefore in charge of making summaries of the officers' activities and sending them to his superiors: Jorge Fernández Díaz and, as the secret document shows, Mariano Rajoy as well.
At the centre, always the same figure
There are few Spanish corruption plots that do not have ex-commissioner José Manuel Villarejo close to their centres and this case is no exception. Sources consulted by the radio station certify that, on October 18th, 2012, just as Operation Catalonia was warming up, Martínez met Villarejo. The police commissioner handed the political figure a secret police report with details of some operations underway against the Catalan party Convergència (partial predecessor to Junts) and other activities directed the PSOE. Afterwards, Martínez transferred the information to the minister Fernández Díaz and then summarized it in the secret note intended for Rajoy.
The secret document was written on October 25th, 2012, a week after the meeting with the former commissioner. So, on October 26th, after the meeting of the Spanish cabinet ended, Fernández Díaz approached the PM and handed him the summary of the operations that the patriotic police had underway against independentism. That was the first document on Operation Catalonia that Rajoy received, but it was not the last.
What did the secret document say?
The document delivered on October 26th, 2012 to Rajoy summarized the conclusions of the first investigations carried out by the patriotic police. The text makes some clearly unreal statements, such as stating that the slogan of the sovereignty process would be "If we continue in Spain, we will be Uganda; with independence, we will be Holland", a message that was obviously never used. Apart from this failing, though, the text contains revelations that would indeed have consequences: it asserts that Artur Mas and the Pujols had accounts abroad, in Andorra, Switzerland or Liechtenstein, false information that, despite this, appeared two weeks later on the cover of Madrid daily El Mundo, shortly before the 2012 parliamentary elections.
Former Barça president Sandro Rosell is also mentioned in this secret document, which affirms that Susana Monje, treasurer of FC Barcelona when Rosell was president, could have been passing information harmful to the PP to Convergència. The document details the source of all this information: police sources infiltrated into Catalan and Andorran banks, various media outlets and even the Mossos d'Esquadra. The text includes a warning: the information is not 100% verified.