A call from Rubén Viñuales to a drug dealer sparks controversy: the Mossos believe he wanted to buy drugs

TarragonaOn June 23, 2017, twenty minutes past 12 noon, Rubén Viñuales, then a lawyer and councilor for Ciutadans at the Tarragona City Council, held a phone call that this Friday has sparked controversy in the city. The portal Portaenrere.cat has transcribed the call, which appears in the summary of a drug trafficking case currently being tried at the Tarragona Court, and has collected the testimony of the Mossos sergeant who led the investigation. On Wednesday, as judicial sources confirmed to ARA, the agent explained to the court that from the conversation between Viñuales and the drug dealer it could be interpreted that the now socialist mayor of Tarragona intended to buy drugs. The mayor has reacted through a statement on Instagram, "categorically" denying this interpretation and justifying that the call was made because he was acting as his interlocutor's lawyer.

In the transcript of the call, collected by Portaenrere.cat, Viñuales tells his interlocutor that he is calling him "for recreational and festive matters, that he has to go to a wedding and that he has to catch a plane right away." "From the analysis of the call, it is inferred that the phone user is requesting a narcotic substance from the accused because he has to go to a wedding and has to catch a plane, but the accused, in the same line of reasoning as other previous calls and following the arrest of V.D., refuses to talk about issues related to drug trafficking over the phone," is described in the summary. V.D. is the nickname of another person arrested for drug trafficking a few months earlier. Precisely, his arrest is pointed to as key to reaching the arrest of the main accused in the trial that is being held in Tarragona. The Mossos who testified on Wednesday highlighted that it was common for "euphemisms" to be found in the conversations to refer to drugs in order to avoid being caught.

The mayor of Tarragona has announced that he will initiate legal action against the author of the report, the journalist Rafa Marrasé. Viñuales is not under investigation in the trial and his name appears, in fact, collaterally in the transcripts of the case's calls that the Mossos considered "relevant" at the time.

"The events date back to 2017 and the reproduced conversation took place within the framework of the professional relationship he maintained as a lawyer with this person, whose defense and various legal matters he had taken on," says Viñuales, who adds that "the link between this conversation and an alleged request for narcotic substances responds exclusively to an interpretation made at that time by the investigating agents and which I do not share at all." In fact, Viñuales recalls that the investigating judge did not share that interpretation and, therefore, he was not investigated "nor summoned to testify, not even as a witness."