The prosecutor in the Pujol case accuses the defenses of wanting to turn the trial into an "attack on Catalonia"

San Fernando de Henares"This process does not attack Catalonia, it intends to defend all Catalan citizens." Prosecutor Fernando Bermejo thus began his final report on the Pujol family trial combatively. The day after announcing that he maintained all the prison sentence requests, it was time to present his conclusions. And after an hour and a half of speech, during the first recess, all the lawyers had three words on their lips: "Spain is robbing us." Why? Because it was one of the mentions the prosecutor made in a belligerent opening. "The defense tried to introduce the so-called patriotic police as witnesses, and their testimony was useless in trying to turn this trial into a political trial and an attack on Catalonia," he maintained. And he made an eminently political plea: "The analysis forces us to confront the public discourse sustained for years according to which "«Spain is robbing us» with the investigated facts. It is particularly contradictory to invoke a discourse of grievance due to lack of resources while fraudulently evading contributions to the system that is supposed to generate these same resources," he proclaimed.

"While it has been stated that the lack of resources from the state made it impossible to adequately fund schools, hospitals, and public services, the judicially examined conduct points to alleged practices of income concealment and evasion of tax obligations. Whoever defrauds the Public Treasury does not harm an abstract entity, but takes resources away from public services," he added. And he framed it all within "political corruption on a very large scale." Fernando Bermejo also recalled the testimony that stated that having accounts in Andorra decades ago was a family tradition: "There was no tradition in Catalonia of having accounts in Andorra, what there was was a crime." "This procedure is not about prosecuting a family for their political ideology, it is about the existence and prolonged operation of a criminal organization," he added.

The prosecutor considers that there has been a "systematic contractual simulation," a "deferred remuneration for influence," and a "concealment of the true cause" of the payments: "There is nothing causal, there is nothing by chance. There is planning and there is undue benefit." He presented it as an "organized, continuous, and conscious" system that was aimed at "remunerating influences, obtaining advantages in contracting, and concealing the illicit origin of the funds.

the mentions made of him throughout the trial have been minimal. However, it is up to the Prosecutor's Office to provide evidence proving the alleged crimes. At another point, he sheltered himself by saying that "everything" he claimed was based on the documentation in the case, but later, when talking about supposed influences, he admitted that "it has not been possible" to prove it: The prosecutor has placed special emphasis on a "structural and prolonged concealment" of money in Andorra and has detailed the role of those responsible. The former president of the Generalitat, who is now an

the mentions made of him throughout the trial have been minimal. At the "operational center" was the firstborn: "Without her nothing works and with him everything moves." And at the third level were the brothers, who were the beneficiaries: story told by all the sons of the former president of the Generalitat about the distribution of the grandfather's inheritance:

"A friend always appears"

account that all the children of the former President of the Generalitat gavewas one of the first witnesses and was the brother of former minister Felip Puig: "Everything is interrelated, they are all friends with each other, there is a continuous correlation".

Vicky Álvarez's complaint

The prosecutor also boasted that the investigation was born from a complaint by Vicky Álvarez in 2012. Jordi Pujol Ferrusola's former lover assured that they both went to Andorra with bags of money, a story that he denied before the court. Fernando Bermejo has mentioned this precedent to justify that when El Mundo published the screenshot of the accounts in Andorra in 2014 the case had been "initiated". However, it had been dormant until Jordi Pujol confessed. "All the defense teams had requested his testimony, we were waiting for him here and they all withdrew, we don't know why," said the prosecutor. However, the only defendant who requested his testimony was Mercè Gironès, the eldest son's ex-wife, who ended up withdrawing. If the prosecutor refers to her complaint, it would have been he, precisely, who should have summoned her.