ERC closes the internal investigation of the posters against the Maragalls asking for forgiveness and blaming Sabrià and Colomer

BarcelonaTwo years after ARA published that the posters about Alzheimer's came from the ranks of ERC, the Esquerra guarantee commission has finally resolved the internal investigation. As this newspaper has learned, the compliance officer of ERC, Mireia Ingla, presented the conclusions of her report to the party's national council this Saturday morning, in which she points to the former deputy secretaries of communication, Sergi Sabrià and Marc Colomer, as the individuals most responsible for the scandal that shook the party. Conversely, she reduces the responsibility of the party's former director of communication, Tolo Moya, and also of the militant from the Anoia region who commissioned the posters, because she asserts that they were following orders.

However, the four individuals implicated in this campaign are no longer militants of the party and, therefore, the guarantee commission has not proposed sanctioning them. Despite being unable to do so, Ingla believes that the actions of Sabrià and Colomer would constitute a serious infraction, but she requests not to open a disciplinary file because they are not members of Esquerra. In the case of Moya and the now former militant from the Anoia region, she requests that the precautionary suspension of membership initiated in July 2024 be lifted, because it has procedural errors: they were not informed at the time that a file was being opened against them nor that they were being suspended from membership.

Ingla has compiled her report by gathering previous reports that had already been prepared by the previous compliance officers and also the truth commission led by Joan Tardà –he presented the conclusions at the ERC congress last March–. However, she questions the first report made by Xavier Mombiela in July 2024 due to its "lack of impartiality" and its "excessive haste". In any case, she accepts as valid the statements of the witnesses who appeared in July 2024, among whom were Sabrià and Colomer, as well as Tolo Moya, the party's former secretary-general, Marta Rovira, and the former deputy secretary of communication, Oriol Duran.

The arguments

The report concludes that Sabrià and Colomer, as heads of communication between 2015 and 2024 (Sabrià between 2015 and 2021 and Colomer between 2022 and 2024), carried out communication actions that went against the party's code of ethics and conduct: it exemplifies this with false flag campaigns like the one against the Maragall brothers, but also with the contract with Relevance –the company through which ERC channeled the campaigns and payments of the B-structure–, in which there were deficiencies, according to the audit commissioned by the party and presented in March 2025. The company invoiced 4 million euros between 2019 and 2024 for various communication actions, which include these counter-campaigns.

Regarding the one carried out against the Maragall brothers, Ingla concludes that Sabrià and Colomer knew it had originated from within ERC's ranks after they became public and criticizes that neither of them activated internal control mechanisms. In this sense, he believes that as early as July 2024 a disciplinary file should have been opened and their membership suspended.

Both in the case of the former militant from Anoia and that of Tolo Moya, he considers that they cooperated in the campaign, but did not design it. However, he believes that they still committed a serious infraction.

The changes so that the B-structure does not return

The compliance officer also proposes a series of changes to the party so that scandals like the one involving the posters against the Maragalls do not happen again. To begin with, she asks that the party reach a political agreement to support her report, and that the control and prevention mechanisms that failed be evaluated. She thus proposes reforms in the command structure so that no organic position remains outside the supervision mechanisms. She also asks for resources for compliance officers to enforce and update codes of conduct, and to hold training sessions for all bodies and membership.

At the national council, the deputy secretary-general of ERC, Oriol López, accepted Ingla's report, according to consulted sources, and apologized on behalf of the party for the "wrongdoing". He added that, in addition to internal explanations, Esquerra also owes a "reparation" to the party and also an "explanation" to society.