Manuel García-Castellón, instructor of the National Court, this Friday expanded his request for protection to the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) after the attacks leveled against him by Gabriel Rufián (ERC) from Congress. According to legal sources, the magistrate responds in this way to the words of the Esquerra deputy, who accused him of being part of a “judicial war” against the independence movement to favor the PP and Vox. García-Castellón already requested this week the support of the governing body of the judges after receiving criticism from members of the Executive of Spain and the Generalitat of Catalonia for citing the former president Carles Puigdemont (Junts) and the general secretary of ERC, Marta Rovira, as defendants in the Democratic Tsunami casewhere the group that allegedly instigated the protests that occurred in Catalonia after the Supreme Court ruling that condemned the leaders of the processes in October 2019.
This Wednesday, during his intervention from the Congress platform in the investiture debate of Pedro Sánchez, Rufián attacked García-Castellón, accusing him of “charging Marta Rovira for terrorism taking advantage of the fact that a man had a heart attack in a demonstration” — in reference to the fact that the magistrate, who received a comprehensive report from the Civil Guard that placed the general secretary of ERC as the ringleader of the Tsunami, has asked to investigate whether there is a “link” between the actions of the suspects and the death of a French tourist during the blockade of the El Prat airport (Barcelona), which was promoted by that movement. The parliamentarian also added: “He is the same judge who, by the way, still does not know who M. Rajoy is, who got Ignacio González out of jail, who saved Cospedal de la Kitchen and who filed the case with the King. Coincidences. What do I know, for whatever reason. “All this is judicial warfare and denying it is like denying that the sun rises and sets for everyone every day.”
Rufián was thus referring to a series of corruption cases that have gone through the National Court. “M. Rajoy” was one of the notes that appeared in the Bárcenas papers; a summary that, in reality, the court led by García-Castellón has not conducted. For its part, in the investigations into the Lezo casethis magistrate agreed in November 2017 to release Ignacio González, former president of the Community of Madrid, on bail of 400,000 euros, but the previous July he had decreed that he remain in preventive detention (where he had been since April) and, as of today , has already ordered him to be tried for three different lines of investigation, for which the Prosecutor’s Office is asking him for almost 20 years in prison.
With respect to Kitchen case, the parapolice operation deployed in 2013 to spy on the former popular treasurer Luis Bárcenas with the alleged objective of stealing compromising documentation on senior PP officials, García-Castellón ordered in the summer of 2021 the dismissal of María Dolores de Cospedal, former secretary general of the party. The investigating judge, in a decision that was later endorsed by the Criminal Chamber of the National Court, limited all responsibility to the leadership of the Ministry of the Interior of the first Government of Mariano Rajoy, headed by Jorge Fernández Díaz, whom he has seated in the bench and for whom the public ministry requests 15 years in prison.
The ERC deputy, who specified in Congress that “the judicial war in this country is a bunch of judges in a bar room at the service of PP and Vox” and that they want to “win with robes what they lose with votes”, He also said that García-Castellón “filed what happened to the King.” The Central Court of Instruction 6, headed by this magistrate, opened a line of investigation within the Villarejo case baptized as Piece Carol, after audio recordings recorded by commissioner José Manuel Villarejo appeared in which Corinna Larsen, lover of Juan Carlos I, attributed to the king emeritus the collection of commissions and the use of front men to hide an alleged fortune in Switzerland and a land in Marrakech. This summary, the origin of the subsequent investigation by the Supreme Court Prosecutor’s Office, was archived in 2018; but Judge Diego de Egea did it, who was assigned to that body of the National Court as a reinforcement judge. García-Castellón reopened the case in 2020, and closed it again a few months later at the request of the public ministry.
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Government criticism
This Thursday, the CGPJ announced that it has already admitted García-Castellón’s request for protection due to criticism from the Secretary of State for Justice, Tontxu Rodríguez, and the spokesperson for the Generalitat of Catalonia, Patricia Plaja, who accused the magistrate of wanting to “influence” the negotiation between the PSOE and Junts by citing as defendants in the Democratic Tsunami case to Puigdemont and Rovira. In an interview, Rodríguez assured: “I have no idea if he has a reason or not, but what a coincidence it has to be on this day, he says. Look, it could have been a year and a half before or a year and a half after, well no. It has to be right in the middle of the negotiations. If that is not influencing, may God come and see… Plaja, in a press conference, noted: “Some, not all, seek not only to condition political negotiations, but to punish them, prevaricating.”
In his writing, the judge denounces that these words represent a “disturbance” in his “independence.” He states, for example, that Rodríguez’s criticism comes from an “organ” to which they correspond, “among other functions, those of support and cooperation with the Administration of Justice […] or participation in the relations of the Ministry with the governing bodies of the General Council of the Judiciary.” “The demonstrations [del secretario de Estad] could imply the clear imputation of the commission of a criminal act, judicial prevarication, by attributing to this instructor the dictation of a resolution with the sole desire to ‘influence’, an extreme completely foreign to the reality of the criminal procedure in which the decision,” he said.
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