The Pujols: devastating prejudice

1. Fourteen years have passed since the initial complaint by Victoria Álvarez. Twelve have passed since Jordi Pujol's confession of grandfather Florenci's inheritance and the fortune hidden abroad. After more than a decade of police investigation and judicial proceedings, after six months of trial and two hundred witnesses at the National Court, not a single piece of evidence has been provided to prove the enrichment through corruption of Jordi Pujol and the seven children accused in the case. Not one. Now that the trial has ended, with the former president exonerated from the case due to his iron poor health, we must await the sentence to know if each of the seven children and the nine businessmen are guilty of anything.

2. The prejudice, however, has been devastating. It has razed Convergència Democràtica, has collapsed Jordi Pujol's image (he lost his office and his pension as former president, ceased to be Most Honorable and ended up without the physical possibility of defending himself), his son Jordi spent eight months in preventive detention, his son Oriol's political career has been cut short, and a powerful Andorran bank has been wiped out. Along the way, even more sadly, Marta Ferrusola has died after losing her memory, Carles Vilarrubí has died without being able to prove his innocence, and even our dear Manel Cuyàs has left us. The biographer of Jordi Pujol's memoirs left this world with the very bitter taste of having told a life story that was missing a fundamental chapter, that of grandfather Florenci's inheritance and all the undeclared millions abroad. At the Diada of 2014, I saw people from Sant Gervasi, extremely disgusted with Pujol, returning the first volume of the Memoirs to his house, at the General Mitre entrance. The general feeling in Catalonia, amplified by the media and other parties, was one of fraud and betrayal. In this time, I have seen how in sports halls inaugurated by Jordi Pujol his name has been covered with a justice spray. In other towns, they have opted to remove the commemorative plaque. Even if President Illa were to publicly reinstate him and invite him to Palau, the public stain has not been completely cleansed. In Spain, "the Pujol clan" has been –and still is– the paradigm of wholesale corruption.

3. I have followed the trial on YouTube as much as I could. First surprise: no one has summoned Victoria Álvarez, the trained mistress who revealed everything by talking about money in bags to Andorra, to testify. The fact that the prosecution has not used the trump card of this witness, paid by the patriotic police, smells fishy. Second alert: the day the head of the UDEF investigation, Álvaro Ibáñez, declared that he felt "personal animosity" towards Jordi Pujol, the defense lawyers celebrated with cava. Or with Corpinnat. This confessed hatred means that the three magistrates of the Court of Appeal will take the police investigations of the case with a pinch of salt. Third relevant factor: the businessmen accused of the schemes with Jordi Pujol Ferrusola assured that they had obtained more public contracts during the left-wing tripartit than with CiU in power. This relevant data remained unproven.

4. Meanwhile, what have the Pujol Ferrusola brothers done well all this time? Never letting themselves be seen together. They entered and left the Court of Appeal separately. Once inside, they did not sit next to each other. They occupied several chairs in the first three rows of the accused and left others empty, to avoid the photo the press needed to publish: that of the clan, of organized crime, the proof of illicit association in a single image. And what if they weren't a clan? What if they were a family? With rough edges, with contradictions, with horns, with a lot of money, with some dirty laundry, and perhaps a black sheep, but a family after all.