Catalan ex-leader may have committed “one or several crimes” – finance minister

Spanish Finance Minister Cristóbal Montoro on Tuesday launched a blistering attack against former Catalan regional leader Jordi Pujol in Congress over his hiding of a multi-million-euro fortune from the tax man for more than 30 years.

Using a tone rarely employed in the lower house, Montoro said: “We cannot rule out that [he has committed] one or several crimes.” He also linked Pujol’s situation to the Catalan independence drive and related decisions made by current regional premier Artur Mas.

The recent written confession by the 84-year-old – who led the region for 23 years and is considered a father of contemporary Catalan nationalism – in which he admitted that he had kept a fortune hidden from the Spanish tax authorities in foreign accounts was not sufficient, the finance minister said, and the veteran politician must accept his responsibilities. “If anyone thinks, like Pujol, that apologizing was wiping the slate clean, they are wrong,” he said.

In Montoro’s view, extra responsibility is demanded of politicians, who have the obligation to set an example.

If anyone thinks, like Pujol, that apologizing was wiping the slate clean, they are wrong”

Addressing Congress to explain the details behind the Pujol case, the finance minister explained that if Pujol had confessed to hiding the money it was the result of the Spanish Tax Agency’s investigations, and because he felt “cornered.”

He revealed no other details about Pujol’s tax affairs, apart from confirmation that he did not take advantage of a tax amnesty that Montoro introduced in March 2012 to encourage people to come clean about undeclared assets. In his written statement, Pujol denied using the amnesty.

The minister is to make all the information available to the Catalan parliament if an investigatory committee is launched and announced that the Solicitor General’s Office would attend the legal proceedings in person to demand responsibility. “We will act in the administrative realm and the judicial realm. We will see this through to the end,” he said.

Montoro said the Tax Agency first started investigating the Pujol family between 2000 and 2002. Its inquiries focused on one specific company and were followed by customs service surveillance in relation to the awarding of contracts for ITV vehicle inspection stations in Catalonia, for which one of Pujol’s sons is now under investigation.

From the end of 2012 the Tax Agency also sought information from individuals and banks about the family’s financial operations in the US, Switzerland, the Netherlands, the UK, Luxembourg and Argentina.

Montoro said that if Pujol had confessed to hiding the money it was because he felt “cornered” by the Tax Office

The details of the case ended there and Montoro reserved the rest of his address for moral and political condemnation of Pujol’s actions, which he said had “caused social alarm” and contributed to alienating people from politics and public institutions.

“Pujol is trying to humanize the outrage committed, as if he could wipe away 30 years of tax secrecy with a fake letter of apology. It cannot be accepted. He has cheated Catalan society and its voters,” he said.

Montoro also made the controversial move of linking Pujol’s actions with the Catalan sovereignty drive, saying they were more serious because the ex-regional leader has been “re-transformed into the champion of the independence movement.”

He said that no “sensible political leader can tolerate the manipulation and political shamelessness of those maintaining a political discourse and in private working for the general interest of a few people.”

He believed it was normal for citizens to question whether Pujol’s “political heirs” might not be contaminated by his “suspect inheritance” – an insinuation that seemed to be directed at current regional leader Artur Mas, also of Pujol’s Democratic Convergence of Catalonia (CDC) party and one half of the CiU nationalist bloc.

Responding to the minister’s comments the CiU’s Pere Macias said Montoro had made “reckless value judgments” and, in an implicit reference to the independence drive, warned him not to “exploit this case more to do judicial work.”