Former CUP MP Anna Gabriel has returned this Tuesday after almost five years of exile in Switzerland in order to appear before the Spanish Supreme Court (SSC). This was reported by surprise this morning by the court itself in a statement. Gabriel appeared accompanied by her lawyer, Iñigo Iruín Sanz, who also represents the former Catalan minister Meritxell Serret. In fact, Serret was the first exile to return to the country, and Gabriel just the second. After appearing before SSC judge Pablo Llarena, she was summoned for questioning in the near future and was subsequently released. Gabriel plans to return to Switzerland today.

Former Catalan Minister for Agriculture Meritxell Serret will not go to prison over the 2017 referendum. Her new defence –led by lawyer Íñigo Iruin– has succeeded in its strategy, based on the outcome of the trial of the Independence Bid leaders. The prosecutions (Prosecutor's Office, State Attorney's Office and Vox) have presented their briefs before Supreme Court's criminal chamber decides on a hearing, and all three have thrown out accusations of embezzlement of public funds. Instead, they focus on a crime of disobedience, which does not carry prison sentences. In addition, if the same logic is followed as with the former members of the Catalan Parliament's Bureau, Serret would be tried in Catalonia

This eleventh of September will mark six months since former minister Meritxell Serret returned from her exile in Belgium. She spent more than three years in Brussels, where, apart from being one of the voices of the pro-independence leaders who decided to go into exile, she also served as the Generalitat's delegate at the European Union. "I risked returning because the other option was worse for me," she explained on Tuesday, taking stock, in an interview with Antoni Bassas. Serret, currently a deputy spokeswoman for ERC in Parliament, has asked that the independence movement stop contrasting the prison that some of its leaders suffered with the exile that some of them still suffer. "The life of an exile is like a glass prison, you have no horizon", she concluded.

This Tuesday, from 10:30 am live on ARA, Antoni Bassas talks with the ERC spokesperson in Parliament, Meritxell Serret.

Meritxell Serret, Catalan Minister of Agriculture at the time of the 2017 Independence Referendum, was charged on March 21, 2018 for alleged disobedience and embezzlement of public funds. And it is precisely for these two crimes for which she could now be judged after the investigating judge, Pablo Llarena, communicated this Thursday that he had completed the indictment and sent the case on to the second chamber of the Supreme Court, presided over by Manuel Marchena. "After completing the proceedings been deemed necessary for the verification of the crime, as well as to determine the defendant's participation in the events and the concurrent circumstances in its commission and considering any other inquiry unnecessary, it is appropriate to conclude the present indictment," the four-page order reads.

Unexpected changed of tack by Catalan political exiles. This Thursday morning the former minister of Agriculture Meritxell Serret has returned to take her seat in the Catalan Parliament and regularise her situation before the Supreme Court. Exiled in Belgium since the declaration of independence in 2017, Serret has appeared before the high court accompanied by her lawyer to make herself available to the investigating judge, Pablo Llarena. The magistrate - through a judicial secretary - has decided to summon her on April 8 for questioning and has allowed her to be released in the meantime. At 6pm she is expected to arrive at her village, Vallfogona de Balaguer, where ERC has already convened a welcome rally in which she will be joined by Speaker Roger Torrent and the ministers Bernat Solé and Teresa Jordà.