A Spanish parliamentary inquiry into deep-state activity that included a smear campaign against Catalan independence leaders and which has implicated a former prime minister has been set up, just weeks before crucial local elections.
After months of delays, a cross-party congressional commission is due to investigate a group believed to have included senior politicians and high-ranking police officers which carried out unlawful activities to help the country’s conservative elite.
In particular, it will look into allegations that they spied on a former treasurer of the conservative Popular Party (PP), Luis Bárcenas, who had blown the whistle on corruption in the party; it is also examining the so-called Operation Catalonia, which saw attempts to embroil pro-independence politicians in fabricated scandals.
Separately, a Madrid judge has opened an investigation into the same anti-independence case, the first time the judiciary has examined it.
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“We are looking at one of the most serious cases of political corruption in Spain’s democratic era,” said government spokesperson Isabel Rodríguez. She said the activities linked to the Catalan case “damage the Spanish state and they damage our democracy”.
Although it is not yet clear how deep the parliamentary inquiry or the judicial investigation will go, revelations over recent weeks have shed light on Operation Catalonia. La Vanguardia newspaper, citing former colleagues of the PP’s former interior minister, Jorge Fernández Díaz, reported that he hatched the plan to discredit Catalan leaders in 2012, the day after a massive pro-independence march in Barcelona.
Fernández Díaz was subsequently recorded on tape asking the head of the Catalan anti-fraud office to find compromising material about the then mayor of Barcelona, Xavier Trias, a Catalan nationalist. In the most widely known example of the workings of Operación Catalonia, El Mundo newspaper published, soon after, details of a supposed bank account containing €13 million belonging to Trias in Switzerland. However, the news turned out to be bogus when the bank said the account did not exist.
The secessionist drive culminated in a declaration of independence by the Catalan parliament in 2017, leading to a brief period of direct rule by Madrid and the jailing of nine independence leaders who were later pardoned.
False information about the funding and finances of the leftist Podemos was also fed to media outlets at the time, when that party was seen as a threat to the established political forces.
The former minister Fernández Díaz, who is due to go on trial over a separate corruption case with police involvement, is one of several conservative politicians now in the eye of the storm in connection with Operation Catalonia. He has been linked to José Manuel Villarejo, a rogue retired police officer who is known to have supervised a decades-long deep-state apparatus underpinned by compromising audio recordings of politicians, judges and other public figures.
Villarejo went on trial in 2021-2022, accused of crimes that included bribery and extortion and he has admitted to involvement in anti-independence subterfuge. Some of the recordings and notes made by Villarejo have suggested that the conservative PP’s then leader and prime minister, Mariano Rajoy, knew about illegal activities aimed at discrediting Catalan politicians.
In an interview with El Periódico de España newspaper, Villarejo said: “The drive, or the approval [to carry out the operations], came from the prime minister – Rajoy.”
Rajoy, who left office in 2018 after his party had become mired in a series of corruption scandals, is also being linked to another, associated case – although this time from abroad. A judge in neighbouring Andorra is investigating whether Rajoy or people working under orders of his government were involved in intimidating the lender Banca Privada de Andorra (BPA) to provide information of its accounts which could be used to embarrass separatist leaders.
All of this has added to the pressure on Rajoy to appear before the parliamentary commission.
“These were not just police sewers, but rather they were supervised from the interior ministry and, it seems, with the blessing of Rajoy,” said Jaume Asens, spokesman for Podemos in the Catalan parliament.
After years during which there appeared to be barely any fallout from Operation Catalonia, the establishment of the parliamentary investigation comes at a bad time for the PP, which is hoping to win back some key regions and city halls from the left in local elections on May 28th.
However, writer and commentator Lola García warned that, with the Catalan independence issue mainly away from the headlines in recent months, many observers will have lost interest in the subterfuge that surrounded it.
“But hiding our heads in the sand as if this dirty war had never happened is a disgrace that weakens the state as much as any attempt at secession,” she noted.
