Easter has arrived with a surprise. Although a change at the helm of the technology and defense company Indra was already expected after the resignation of Àngel Escribano as president, the appointment of Àngel Simón to replace him has made all the headlines. Simón's proposal was made by the Spanish government through the State Industrial Holdings Company (SEPI), its investment arm, which is Indra's largest shareholder with 28% of the share capital. the appointment of Àngel Simón to replace him has made all the headlines. Simón's proposal was made by the Spanish government through the State Industrial Holdings Company (SEPI), its investment arm, which is Indra's largest shareholder with 28% of the share capital.

On Friday, April 30, 2021, Chiqui had prepared a ColaCao and a cortado for her nephew Xavi and her son Carlos. At six in the morning, they were already leaving home for the factory, and, as always, she said goodbye to them from the doorway. A little later, she also headed to work. Around ten thirty, she received an unexpected visitor: it was Carlos, his face pale and sunken. "I stared at him and thought something had happened," Chiqui remembers. He took her hands and said, "Mom, Xavi had an accident at work and died."

Script twist, at least temporarily, in the case against the previous Parliamentary Bureau for having allowed a debate and a vote on resolutions in favour of the independence referendum and against the monarchy. Catalonia's High Court has accepted the recusal of the court's president, Jesús María Barrientos, which was demanded by former deputy Speaker Josep Costa. This means that the court will remove Barrientos from the case and, automatically, will postpone the trial –initially scheduled for July 12, 13 and 15– so that Barrientos can be replaced by another magistrate. The High Court admits the recusal because it accepts that Barrientos's leaving a conference in which the situation of "political prisoners" was denounced was not neutral, "but a public and forceful show of disagreement with the person". It was on February 23, 2018 at the Col·legi d'Advocats and giving the conference was then Speaker Roger Torrent, who has been indicted in this case.

He had been dodging lawsuits throughout his speakership, but just before the end of his term, the Prosecutor accused Roger Torrent of contempt of court. Once the instruction was finished, the Catalan High Court announced the trial will be held on July 12, 13 and 15, starting at 10 am. In addition to Torrent, the rest of pro-independence parliamentary bureau members have been subpoenaed: Josep Costa, who was deputy speaker, and Eusebi Campdepadrós and Adriana Delgado, who were secretaries. The investigating magistrate concluded that there was sufficient evidence that all of them had acted in contempt of the Constitutional Court by allowing the Catalan Parliament to discuss self-determination and the monarchy. The Prosecutor's Office is seeking a 20-month ban and a €30,000 fine for Torrent, Costa and Campdepadrós and an 18-month ban and a €24,000 fine for Delgado, who only participated in the processing of one of the initiatives.

One of parliamentary parties' commitments this term was to reform MPs' salaries so that allowances they receive for travel according to where they live –whether they justify them or not– are taxed, since they are currently exempt from personal income tax. The case of Parliamentary bureau members is even more controversial, since they receive travel allowances despite having an official car at their disposal. In the case of the Speaker, it is at their disposal every day. ARA made a freedom of information request on January 28 –the data, therefore, is from this date– to know what trips the current bureau members have made with an official vehicle and the compensation they have also received for travel. We also asked for this data on the last two parliaments.

Catalonia's High Court will try former Speaker and current minister for Enterprise and Employment Roger Torrent, alongside the other pro-independence members of the previous Parliamentary Bureau, for having allowed the processing of resolutions on the monarchy and self-determination in autumn 2019. In a resolution issued this Wednesday, the investigating magistrate Maria Eugènia Alegret considers that Torrent, Josep Costa, Eusebi Campdepadrós and Ariadna Delgado could have committed a crime of serious disobedience and gives them a period of ten days to submit their defence briefs.

On the same day that the negotiating table met, the pro-independence members of the last Parliamentary Bureau – Roger Torrent, Josep Costa, Eusebi Campdepadrós and Adriana Delgado – were summoned to testify as accused before Catalonia's High Court for having processed resolutions in favour of self-determination and against the monarchy despite the warnings of the Constitutional Court. All appeared in court except Costa, who on Twitter explained that he does not recognise the court's "authority" to "judge parliament's agreements". Torrent, Delgado and Campdepadrós have defended MPs' freedom of speech and argued that the Constitutional Court's warning was ambiguous. According to court sources, Torrent emphasised the defence of parliamentary inviolability. "We explained that if we are sentenced it will lay a bad precedent from a democratic point of view," the former Speaker said after testifying.

The Catalan Government will launch a fund to capitalise strategic industrial investments this autumn. The fund will be given an initial endowment of only €15m, although it ought to be increased over the coming years, Catalan Minister for Enterprise and Employment Roger Torrent has explained. The final allocation will depend on the needs identified by the committee for the National Pact for Industry as well as the available budget.

The pardons only affects the 9 politicians sentenced to prison in the trial of the Catalan independence bid, which was heard in the Supreme Court in the first half of 2019. Therefore, it leaves out all the rest of the open cases against thousands of people, about 3,000 according to the calculations of Òmnium Cultural. These have been kept alive in different courts and institutions of the State administration, such as the Court of Auditors. Defusing them will be one of the challenges of the new stage of dialogue between the Spanish and Catalan governments. This is a summary of the main pending cases:

The start of the negotiations after Easter is slower than expected. On the first working day after Easter, Tuesday, there was no formal meeting between the ERC and Junts negotiators, and this Wednesday afternoon there has only been one meeting, which lasted little more than two hours. According to sources familiar with the talks, they have discussed the government programme, but have not yet talked about the structure the executive should have and the distribution of cabinet posts.

A new term has started but the legal consequences of the previous term are yet to play out. Friday was the last day of Roger Torrent as Speaker, as well as for the hitherto members of the parliamentary bureau. Two weeks before leaving office they learned that the prosecutor's office was seeking to prosecute them for disobedience and now Catalonia's High Court has admitted the procedure. The prosecution accuses the former Speaker and the pro-independence members of the bureau - Josep Costa, Eusebi Campdepadrós and Adriana Delgado - of disobedience for having processed a resolution to respond to the conviction of the 2017 referendum organisers, in which, among other things, they reiterated Parliament's commitment to the self-determination of Catalonia and the reprobation of the monarchy, despite the warnings of the chamber lawyers that this could violate the prohibition of the Constitutional Court.

Laura Borràs is already the sixteenth Speaker of the Catalan Parliament after being voted in this Friday in the constitutive session of the legislature. It has not taken many minutes to show that she intends to exercise a militant speakership: her first speech has been full of references to freedom of expression, prisoners, exiles and self-determination. Borràs has just turned 50, she has been in front-line politics for only three years and intends to continue being a mainstay in the coming years. A profile that now seems usual but it is radically opposite to the one that had been chosen in most elections in the chamber. The speakership has gone from being an honorary prize to a political platform of the first magnitude.

In the next two weeks Parliament will choose a new Speaker and will also renew the other posts in the Parliamentary bureau. But before leaving, the current pro-independence members already know that they will have to deal with a lawsuit filed in the High Court of Justice of Catalonia. The Prosecutor's Office has announced on Monday that it will sue for disobedience against the current Speaker, Roger Torrent, the first vice-Speaker, Josep Costa, and secretaries Eusebi Campdepadrós and Adriana Delgado. That is, those represented by JxCat and ERC in the parliamentary bureau. This is because almost a year ago they admitted a resolution on the response to the sentence against independence leaders. The resolution reiterated the commitment of Parliament to Catalonia's self-determination. And this is despite the fact that pro-independence parties squabbled until they managed to agree on a fairly tame formula a mere 43 days after the Supreme Court's ruling. "Therefore, [the Parliament] reiterates and will reiterate as many times as the deputies want the reprobation of the monarchy, the defence of the right to self-determination and the vindication of the sovereignty of the people of Catalonia to decide their political future," it proclaimed. This statement received Parliament's backing on November 26, 2019.