Trial of Catalan independence leaders enters final stage with embezzlement focus

Catalan independence trial enters final stretch with embezzlement as key charge

[P]In a school in Sant Andreu de Palomar, on October 1, 2017, a Civil Guard corporal had to retreat amid insults while his colleagues loaded boxes of ballot boxes. A year and a half later, that episode reached the Supreme Court as evidence. The oral hearing against the leaders of the independence challenge—rebellion, sedition, and embezzlement on the table—was facing its final stage with a twist that not even the prosecution's briefs had emphasized as much: embezzlement was beginning to be seen as the most solid part of the incriminating narrative.[/P]

[P]The structure of the case was not new. What was new was the tone. The same lawyers who in October 2017 rallied the crowd from the squares now appeared in the Second Chamber of the Supreme Court repeating the same litany to every officer who sat in the witness chair: if there were charges, if the neighbors sang "som gent de pau", if someone could confuse a poster with a republican call. The script broke every time the witness did not cooperate. Explain, explain, the defense insisted while the questioned responded with a monosyllable.[/P]

Defense witnesses who do not support the narrative

[P]The list of witnesses provided to reinforce the thesis of a peaceful referendum became, day by day, ammunition for the prosecution. The court itself described as "irrelevant" the testimonies of the first called by the defenses, in the words of the judge who instructed the original case. Several witnesses admitted to having insulted the officers, none proved the injuries they claimed to have left the hospital with, and one of them could not sustain the basic claim of the accusation—that the police charged without saying a word—when asked to specify the exact point of the school.[/P]

[P]The rest was by elevation. One witness admitted that the crowds of neighbors stationed at the door of the centers physically prevented the passage of patrols, while insisting on the peaceful nature of the blockade. Another, called by the defense of the president of Òmnium, went blank when asked about the insults he himself had hurled at the officers. The pro-independence lawyers themselves began to feel uncomfortable when the story did not match the video projected in the room.[/P]

[P]There was even an element that the prosecution could place on the table without the need for witnesses. The Civil Guard provided a recording in which a mossa d’esquadra berated the officers of the Armed Institute instead of helping them, while in the video the urban police of the City Council were seen collaborating with the judicial committee. The symmetry did not exist. And it was not an opinion: it was the transcript of what was recorded.[/P]

The cost of 1-O: embezzlement enters the scene

[P]The arithmetic of the suspended referendum was the second major focus. As the sessions pogre, it became clear that the accusation of embezzlement was not a rhetorical addition: it was the financial framework of the entire case. The prosecution argued that the Government allocated public funds to pay for the consultation and that this operation was forged with invoices from companies such as Unipost, with opaque items and with the connivance of public media officials. The judge even indicted the directors of TV3 and Catalunya Ràdio for their participation in the preparations for 1-O, according to the case material.[/P]

[P]The chapter on invoices gave rise to one of the most commented paradoxes of the trial. Dozens of suppliers declared that their services had been provided without payment or with deferred payment, which the prosecution reconstructed as a sort of covert financing. Renouncing payment, in accounting terms, is equivalent to a donation, a sector in which party financing legislation imposes strict limits. The irony that suppliers went from creditors to alleged participants in the money trail intoxicated several sessions.[/P]

[P]The defense tried to deactivate the financial front with the argument that the Government acted within the framework of its autonomous powers and that the transfers were legitimate. The lawyers failed to dismantle it with documentary evidence. And this detail—that the piece where the prosecution breathes most comfortably is not rebellion but the money—explains why the public discussion drifted toward which crime will survive in the end.[/P]

International observers and the €8,000 bill

[P]The day with the most dialectical exchanges came with the appearance of the two international observers who had trinc the trial with the sponsorship of the Generalitat. A German politician and a New Zealander who testified before the court through an interpreter: her intervention, moreover, had been paid about €8,000 for leading a team that had prepared a report without it being clear who had commissioned the work, as was stressed during the hearing.[/P]

[P]The defense tried to turn both witnesses into notaries of the democratic normality of the procés. The prosecution, on the other hand, exploited the wiretaps: that the German had opined on police action without having been present, that his relationship with the independence movement predated the trial, that the report did not prove the methodology of the conclusions. The result, as recorded, was that not even the witnesses called to endorse the main thesis of the defense gave the profile expected of them.[/P]

[P]The economic detail, in any case, shifted the discussion to a more uncomfortable terrain: that of who pays the international endorsements of a political cause. Some argue that such reports are financed with public money from the autonomous community; others reply that states also hire external advisors when it suits them. The controversy was not closed, but the detail of the remuneration entered the narrative of the trial and never left it.[/P]

The UN opinion and the echo in the New York Times

[P]While the Second Chamber continued to receive witnesses, the political battle moved to international bodies. The president of the Generalitat presented as support for his cause an opinion of the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention that called for the release of several defendants. The text had wide media coverage and was presented as a disavowal of the process. And, in the background, a textbook diplomatic crisis: the Spanish Government dismissed its conclusions, the international press reported the rejection, and the debate turned to whether the panel acted "under the umbrella" of the United Nations or "as" the United Nations.[/P]

[P]The president of the group that signed the opinion, a jurist with a previous controversial career in Mexico, became the center of the target. The accusation of partiality circulated intensely and without reaching a verifiable ground. The defense, for its part, insisted on the authority of the opinion over any internal sentence. It is a debate that remains open and that probably will not be closed with the oral hearing.[/P]

[P]The other media front was the New York Times. A report by the New York newspaper titled in its original version with the formula "Jailed Catalans" was read as an international validation of the secessionist narrative. The counter-reading, supported by the correspondent's signature and his history of sympathy with the movement, was just as quick. Ultimately, the battle was no longer fought only in the courtroom: it was also fought in the translation of four words into the language of the global press.[/P]

Puigdemont, the European elections and the credential that is not collected

[P]The expresident, installed in Belgium since the end of 2017, chose the European electoral calendar as a platform. He announced his candidacy for the European elections and called on "all those who want us silenced, defeated, imprisoned and forgotten" to vote for him. The slogan circulated among Basque and Catalan sympathizers: the goal was not only a seat in Brussels, it was to score a symbolic victory against Spanish justice and against what he considered a media siege.[/P]

[P]The problem, obviously, was the credential. A MEP who cannot set foot on Spanish territory without risk of arrest has difficulty collecting his credential in Madrid. The circulating hypothesis was that he could do so at the German embassy or even at a consulate, with all the diplomatic game that implies. No one specified the procedure. The paradox remained floating: to validate the election one must go to Madrid; to return to Madrid one must calculate the legal cost. The symbol worked better than the logistics.[/P]

The wear and tear at the polls: Barcelona and the frozen base

[P]The secessionist narrative did not come out only damaged from the Supreme Court. The municipal elections of May 2019 left ERC and Junts below an absolute majority in the Barcelona City Council. The Government's spokesperson even stated publicly that "independenceism has won in Barcelona" when the results indicated the opposite: the councilors of the bloc had gone from 18 to 15, out of a total of 41. The moment was widely commented as a symptom of the growing divorce between rhetoric and numbers.[/P]

[P]The data of 50+1 resisted. The threshold remained practically frozen despite the expectations created, and the recognition—almost whispered—began to circulate in the independence conversation itself: that the movement had stalled its growth in the only terrain where it really counts, that of the vote. The statement, formulated from within the movement itself, was more devastating than any editorial.[/P]

Europe, the German judges and the external alibi

[P]The argument of the illegitimacy of the Spanish process had its cornerstone in European justice. A German court had rejected the extradition of the expresident for the crime of rebellion, a setback that the defense exploited as proof that the case did not hold outside Spain. The counterpart responded that the rejection affected the technical fit of the crime, not the facts, and that Spain remained the only country competent to try them.[/P]

[P]The diplomatic battle echoed in the institutions. About fifty French senators expressed their public support for the secessionist cause, according to the material of the discussion. And in France, as in the rest of the EU, the recognition of the self-determination of a region is not in the legal system. The external alibi worked in the headlines; it failed in the legal codes.[/P]

[P]That was, perhaps, the most cynical point of the entire trial: that part of the public discussion was no longer about whether the events occurred, but about which of the three crimes would survive the sentence. The most cited hypothesis among those who trinc the case with some discipline was that embezzlement would be the piece that would support a possible European arrest warrant, because rebellion and sedition could encounter judicial resistance in northern Europe. No one confirmed it. No one ruled it out.[/P]

The residue of the process

[P]The second major front left by the trial was not political, it was economic. The exit of companies that left Catalonia after the expresident's flight was a sustained drip that exceeded 4,500 companies, according to data circulating at the time. The most bitter reading, subscribed even by some managers linked to Barcelona's productive fabric, was that three quarters of those companies would not return. Changes of fiscal headquarters are not reversible by decree.[/P]

[P]With that burden, the post-sentence scenario was guessed complex for the Generalitat: more international propaganda, less fiscal margin to pay the internal bill. And with an independence movement fragmented between two parties that no longer spoke to each other, the narrative of the streets was beginning to be an expensive asset to maintain. In the words of a Catalan economic analyst, the business stampede had no recent parallel in the Western world.[/P]

[P]The trial continued its course. The oral hearing, broadcast live, would continue to occupy weeks of the Second Chamber. The judges would deliberate. And in the public conversation the most uncomfortable question of the entire process would remain floating: if the witnesses called to defend the narrative of the peaceful referendum ended up giving ammunition to the prosecution, what remains of the narrative when the applause is withdrawn?[/P]