Neither prevarication nor embezzlement. The Superior Prosecutor’s Office of Catalonia has asked to archive the complaint that the former president of the Generalitat of Catalonia Carles Puigdemont filed against Judge Joaquín Aguirre, considering that the magistrate’s actions with the investigation of the Russian plot of the process was “totally reasonable and sustainable.”
After several months of debate and analysis of documentation, the Prosecutor’s Office presented this Monday before the Superior Court of Justice of Catalonia (TSJC) a report in which it asks the court to reject the complaint that the former president filed last July after the controversial investigation of the magistrate, which Puigdemont considered constitutive of the crimes of prevarication and embezzlement.
The events date back to last June, when Judge Aguirre opened a new piece to investigate the Russian plot after the Barcelona Court ordered him to archive or send the case to trial. The maneuver served the magistrate to charge Puigdemont and not grant him amnesty for facts that he had been investigating for almost five years without having formally investigated the former president. Afterwards, the instructor sent the case to the Supreme Court, which has not yet decided whether to take on the Russian plot.
The magistrate admitted that continuing to investigate the Russian plot represented an “alternative solution to the objections” that the Barcelona Court had raised. Judge Aguirre also recognized that the order of the higher court “led to a dismissal of the Russian interference due to lack of sufficient instruction.”
The “alternative solution” that the magistrate found was to open a new separate room, from another different from the one that had been knocked down, to investigate the same facts that his superiors had prevented him from investigating. This “legal interpretation” of the magistrate is “totally reasonable and sustainable”, in the opinion of the Prosecutor’s Office and does not represent an unfair resolution, as Puigdemont maintained.
The opening of a new piece on the Russian plot, prosecutor Assumpta Pujol explains, is “procedurally possible”, since it does not imply an “illegal cloning” of the same piece that the Barcelona Court had prevented from continuing. It is, says the prosecutor, quoting the words of Judge Aguirre himself, about the “review of the existing material of progressive crystallization accumulated in various pieces of the case that allows an expansion of the facts to be investigated and implicating more people.”
In short, for the prosecutor “it cannot be considered prevaricative conduct by the magistrate.”
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