Patriarch Florenci Pujol goes on trial 45 years after his death

Florenci Pujol i Brugat was an interesting character. He made most of his considerable fortune by trafficking in the scarcest commodity in an autarkic dictatorship: the foreign currency that allowed the Catalan textile industry to import and export. Now, 45 years after his death in 1980, he is at the center of a trial against his son Jordi and seven of his grandchildren. It is curious that Pau Ferrer, the lawyer for four of the former president's children (Marta, Mireia, Pere, and Oleguer), presented the book as evidence for the defense in the first session of the trial. Banca Catalana. More than a bank, more than a crisisThat book was written by Siscu Baiges, Jaume Reixach, and myself after a long and unpleasant investigation: Jordi Pujol's bankrupt bank was a taboo subject, and no one wanted to speak openly about it. Pressure and threats abounded, both before and after publication. The book marked the lives of the three of us in one way or another.

I think I understand that, with the book, the lawyer Ferrer is trying to demonstrate that Jordi Pujol's father was a wealthy man and that, therefore, the explanation of the former president of Catalonia would make sense, according to which the money he hid in Andorra came from an inheritance from Florenci: a small treasure hidden abroad in case Jordi ever had to go into exile. Anything is possible, of course. Personally, I tend not to believe that version of the story.

Florenci Pujol and his partner Moisés David Tennenbaum knew how to move money. In their early twenties, they began working for a stock exchange and brokerage firm. After the Civil War, having established their own business, they held a dominant position in the "Bolsín," a more or less unofficial stock market that operated parallel to the Barcelona Stock Exchange. They also created a foreign exchange brokerage.

It's important to remember the historical context. From the Francoist victory until the 1959 stabilization plan, the Spanish economy was autarkic. That is to say, it remained almost isolated from the outside world. Due to a chronic deficit in the balance of payments and trade, the Bank of Spain had hardly any foreign currency reserves. And Spanish industry, concentrated in Catalonia and the Basque Country, needed foreign currency to import raw materials. Without raw materials and tools, there were no exports. And without exports, there was no foreign currency inflow. It was a vicious cycle.

People like Florenci Pujol and Moisés David Tennenbaum offered solutions to the foreign currency problem. Obviously not legally, because legal avenues were scarce. Florenci, known as "the Pujolet of the Stock Exchange," routinely engaged in currency trafficking and, consequently, tax evasion. Thanks to his businesses, in 1959 (the year autarky officially ended and therefore his modus vivendi (on the fringes of legality) was able to buy Banca Dorca in Olot.

It was a bank that was practically worthless, but it had great value as a "token": creating a new bank was almost impossible for a family like the Pujols, lacking Francoist credentials, but they could buy and develop an existing one. Two years later, Banca Dorca became Banca Catalana. The authors of Catalan Bank We couldn't find out how that name could have been authorized back then. The fact is that Florenci gave his son the bank that, according to Jordi, he needed to politically rebuild Catalonia.

There isn't space here to explain the causes of the Banca Catalana crisis in 1982. There were many, mainly related to a management style that was more political than banking-related. The lawsuit filed in 1984 by the State Attorney General's Office against the bank's former managers, including Jordi Pujol, and the dismissal of the case in 1990, are two central milestones in that long phenomenon we call "Pujolism."

Certainly, Florenci Pujol may have left his son some hidden money. But, I insist, I don't believe it.

Because I don't believe Florenci would have done it without telling his daughter María and his son-in-law, Francesc Cabana, in whom he placed his utmost trust. Because it was never definitively clarified what happened to Pujol's shares in Banca Catalana: were they, like the others, reduced to the value of one peseta in the "accordion operation" of the bailout? I don't quite believe it, and after a covert sale prior to the crisis (a mere hypothesis), the money obtained could have ended up in Andorra. And because, although I don't blindly believe the reports of the Spanish police, the trafficking of bags of cash by Jordi Pujol's family to Andorra did exist, and it lasted for many years.