The defenses of the Pujol case discredit the UDEF investigator: "Did he look for it on Google?"

Madrid"I don't know." And so on 35 times. The commander of the economic and fiscal crime unit (UDEF) who prepared the reports in the Pujol case has acknowledged today that he may have made inaccuracies and ambiguities in his reports. After testifying for more than five hours responding to questions from the Public Prosecutor's Office and the State Attorney's Office, today the defense teams put him on the spot for six hours to try to discredit the hypotheses and inferences he made in the twenty or so reports he signed. "We are seeing sloppiness," summarized Cristóbal Martell, Jordi Pujol Ferrusola's lawyer, at one point during his interrogation. When Pau Ferrer, lawyer for four of the former Catalan president's children, asked him about grandfather Florenci's legacy – which the witness had doubted yesterday – he admitted to having searched for information on Google. And at other times he also admitted to using the famous search engine. So much so that Oriol Rusca, the lawyer for Mercè Gironès – ex-wife of the eldest son – mocked him.

– Did anything happen in the world, from 2006 to 2009, that could have changed the valuation of some property? Did you take into account that there was a real estate crisis? Did you look it up on Google?

Rusca focused on some of the statements made by the UDEF investigator to, ironically, "appreciate the rigor" of the investigation. "You act based on what Google says," he retorted. Later, after one of the breaks, Álvaro Ibáñez avoided repeating it: "I won't repeat the search engine so there are no more jokes."

The first to interrogate Ibáñez was Cristóbal Martell, Jordi Pujol Ferrusola's lawyer, who dedicated himself to questioning the conclusions reached in the UDEF reports and to casting doubt on all the omissions. "Didn't it seem relevant to you?" he tirelessly asked. For example, the fact of knowing that some town councils involved in suspicious operations had PSC mayors. Or the possibility of asking members of the Port of Tarragona council if they had received "pressure or incitement" at any time: "It is not my job," he replied. After stating this Wednesday that an agenda belonging to Jordi Pujol Ferrusola detailed meetings with high-ranking officials of the Generalitat, Martell retorted that the cover indicated that the agenda belonged to Jordi Puig Godés. "Isn't that decisive?" he asked. "An agenda can say many things and then be handwritten," Ibáñez defended himself.

One of the tense moments was when Martell asked him if the information "had exchange value," a question the witness did not understand. "I will not give economics lessons, as you said you had a lot of degrees," the lawyer reproached him. "I still don't understand, I say I'm ignorant and that's it," replied the witness, annoyed. And the president of the court reprimanded him: "This is not the attitude of a witness, you must be cooperative, it is something quite basic, you surely know it perfectly well."

Another lawyer who dismantled the UDEF investigator's account was José Antonio Choclán, lawyer for businessman Luis Delso. The focus was on a supposed meeting between him and Jordi Pujol Ferrusola in 2006, which served as a pretext to search his home and the headquarters of his company, Isolux. The witness ended up admitting that the only indication of the meeting came from the leak of an email to El Mundo, but that he could not verify that the meeting had taken place: "If I have to vouch for it, I can't, because I don't know if it happened," he finally acknowledged. Despite this, the report stated that money laundering had been discussed at the meeting. "It was poorly expressed," he said on Thursday.

Neither Villarejo nor Pino

For his part, Diego Artacho, the lawyer for Carles Sumarroca – whose family filed a complaint for Operation Catalonia, which was directed, among others, against the UDEF investigator – directly asked him about the intervention of the patriotic police. Álvaro Ibáñez denied this "categorically." He replied that he had not received any "instruction" and had no "relationship" with Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo or with the then deputy operational director of the Spanish police, Eugenio Pino. "It offends me personally," he complained.