On November 9, 2017, all political and media attention in Catalonia was focused on Plaza Villa de París in Madrid, at the Supreme Court. Members of the Parliament's board, led by Carme Forcadell, paraded through there, facing the threat of ending up in pretrial detention—which was what happened that night for the speaker of the chamber—just as a few days earlier had happened to half of the Catalan government and also to the leaders of the ANC and Ómnium (Carles Puigdemont was already in Belgium). Mariano Rajoy was leading the Spanish government and just over ten days before, he had invoked Article 155 to quell the declaration of independence in the Parliament. But while all this was happening and Catalonia was experiencing its most tense weeks since the restoration of democracy, the Criminal Investigation Unit of the Mossos d'Esquadra (Catalan police) had its eye on another location: the company Messer Ibérica de Gases SA (Tarragona). That day, a search was scheduled, which unexpectedly led them to uncover one of the most sophisticated cases of alleged corruption since the end of the dictatorship: the Montoro case.