BarcelonaThe posters against the Maragall brothers were hung on the night of March 8, 2023, but it was not until early 2024 that the ERC had the feeling that the false flag attack scandal could explode in the hands of the judicial investigation that had already pointed to a political operation that had arisen within the party, and with Ernest Maragall angry at the police indications, the party’s communications department drew up a plan. As the coalition is able to compare, it happened in February when the former deputy government minister, Sergi Sabriá, and the party’s deputy communications secretary, Oriol Durán, decided who would be the “firewall” (as they refer to it) in a meeting) in case everything came to light: they were only referring to the extent to which the police had gone.
It was therefore essential to know the names mentioned in the police report and who was working to obtain this document. ARA was able to reconstruct these meetings, in which there was a direct dialogue with the party director, Jordi Roig. The name they knew for sure that the police had reached was that of the Anoia fighter who ordered the posters to be placed, because his phone was tapped and they spoke to him directly. Sabria did it in person and through encrypted messaging applications: on Keybase, the boy was called Solar and Sabria had the name Havanera.
So, at first, a “firewall” was set up in the hardline Anoia to prevent the strings from being pulled up and end up revealing B, the parallel structure of the counter-campaign that had been operating for years in Esquerra. They commented in these meetings that, on paper, they shouldn’t know where the posters came from and, therefore, they needed someone to send them to them in order to start taking action. There was talk of the possibility of opening an internal investigation that could go as far as putting up a firewall and they gave the final word to Roig. But they decided to wait to see what the Mossos had. Finally, the internal investigation was not completed until the agency revealed the case two weeks ago, and it only ended up targeting the four people who were precisely published in the information of this newspaper.
Despite knowing that the police investigation was bearing fruit that would threaten the party, the contact team had always hoped that the case would never be made public. But they feared how Maragall would react when he discovered the truth. At this point, the CER candidate for the last two elections in Barcelona had serious doubts based on the police investigations – he had access to the summary as an accusatory party – and he had informed the party. He had even commented on it to the state president Pere Aragonés. Sources from the Presidency of the Government confirmed to ARA that this conversation had taken place in February and that the president had encouraged him to pursue the police investigation to the end.
Maragall was one of the ways Duran and Sabria decided to try to get to the summary, and they also hoped that he would end up withdrawing the complaint, confident that the whole thing would end up on wet paper. A few days later Maragall withdrew from the case and a few weeks later the judge dismissed it.
Payment structure
Deactivating the investigation and convincing Maragall to eventually become an ally was the primary goal, but they still feared that the case would get out of hand at some point. At the time, they did not know that the ARA had been investigating these links between the Republicans and the three young men who had hung anti-Maragalls Alzheimer’s posters in Barcelona for months. In fact, it was the payments of at least €15,000 to these three men – officially only one was paid, which he shared with others – through the “liaison” company that ended up revealing how the party’s “B” structure worked.
In the case of the posters, at least three invoices were submitted in the months following March 2023, but the party has accumulated dozens of invoices through the connection, especially in the name of the five party activists chosen to carry out the entire counter-campaign. Actions. Between mid-2022 and mid-2023, this structure charged fees of at least 70,000 euros, and never had to submit any reports to justify the invoices.
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