Florenci Pujol i Brugat was an interesting character. He made most of his considerable fortune by trafficking in the scarcest commodity in an autarkic dictatorship: the foreign currency that allowed the Catalan textile industry to import and export. Now, 45 years after his death in 1980, he is at the center of a trial against his son Jordi and seven of his grandchildren. It is curious that Pau Ferrer, the lawyer for four of the former president's children (Marta, Mireia, Pere, and Oleguer), presented the book as evidence for the defense in the first session of the trial. Banca Catalana. More than a bank, more than a crisisThat book was written by Siscu Baiges, Jaume Reixach, and myself after a long and unpleasant investigation: Jordi Pujol's bankrupt bank was a taboo subject, and no one wanted to speak openly about it. Pressure and threats abounded, both before and after publication. The book marked the lives of the three of us in one way or another.

It is legitimate to ask whether the trial of the Pujol family would have taken place without the Catalan independence process. And, after more than twelve years of judicial investigation and knowing what is now known about Operation Catalonia, it is reasonable to answer no. And perhaps the former president's confession in July 2014, admitting that he had hidden money abroad for thirty years, would not have occurred either. Mariano Rajoy's government mistakenly believed that to deactivate the Catalan independence process, it was necessary to deactivate Pujol. Beyond the rumors that have always surrounded the younger Pujol—the former president had been warned about certain behaviors of the eldest son—there was nothing legally relevant about the family until well into 2012, when Convergència was already embracing the independence movement. The party's irregular financing, which was proven with the Palau case ruling, is another matter. Until then, had the State tolerated certain practices of the Pujol family? Or was it that before 2012 he was unable to obtain evidence of irregular commissions? Or is there nothing there, and the money in Andorra is simply the result of a legacy from his grandfather Florenci? This is what must be determined in the trial at the National Court, which begins this Monday in San Fernando de Henares.

Jordi Pujol is the president who has given the most power to Catalonia, and the journalist Txema Seglers wanted to reflect this in his book Pujol and I (Saldonar, 2025) a portrait of the character through thirty witnesses, as well as his personal history. This vision of the heads and tails has landed in the presentation of the book, together with the former councilor Irene Rigau, the ERC deputy in Congress Francesc-Marc Álvaro and the deputy director of the ARA and president of the Barnils Group, Enric Borràs –all of them participants in the book–. Beyond the fact that each one has "his Pujol", in full rise of the far right and the questioning of sanitary cordons In the Catalan Alliance, he planned an idea of consensus: "What Pujol said about Catalanness in the 60s and 70s is now countercultural and progressive," said Álvaro.