“We have seen some statements by a Defense Minister that makes her politically incapable of continuing in that position.” On April 27, Pere Aragonès expressed himself in this way in Parliament about Margarita Robles. Today, at a press conference after the meeting of the Consell Executiu, the Government has moderated the speech. He prefers to go step by step and has at all times avoided explicitly demanding Robles’ resignation. And it is that the Catalan Executive prefers to wait if there is a succession of events and decisions in Moncloa before the meeting that Pedro Sánchez promised on Friday with the president of the Generalitat. For now, Paz Esteban has stepped down from her position as director of the National Intelligence Center (CNI).
“Do not interpret assumption of responsibilities simply as resignations or cutting off heads, as has sometimes been said,” responded the spokeswoman for the Government, Patrícia Plaja, at the insistence of journalists on whether the Generalitat continued to request the dismissal of the minister after meeting Stephen’s resignation. For the Catalan Executive “the concept of ‘political responsibilities’ goes beyond the cessation or resignations that may exist”. “We will not put names and surnames (…) . We are looking for those people who have some to assume responsibilities,” Plaja later said somewhat more clearly.
In any case, the Government is clear that more transparency is necessary and in a letter that the Minister of the Presidency, Laura Vilagrà, has sent to her counterpart in Moncloa, Félix Bolaños, she demands that the contracts that the CNI may having signed with NSO Group, the company that owns the Pegasus espionage software. In addition, Vilagrà has communicated to the Government the determination of the Generalitat to go “to the end” in order to clarify the espionage of more than sixty people from the pro-independence environment uncovered a few weeks ago by Citizen Lab. The Government wants them to “purify responsibilities” and that the judicial orders or authorizations that allowed the interception of Pere Aragonès’s telephone be declassified.
Likewise, the Minister highlights in the letter that the PSOE’s refusal to set up an investigative commission in Congress does nothing more than “deepen” the loss of political and institutional confidence in the Government.
Be that as it may, in the Government they even reject that the dismissal of the director of the CNI can be considered at least a gesture. “This is not about gestures because the seriousness of the case requires sensible decisions,” Plaja stressed. The meeting between the Spanish and Catalan presidents still has no date or place. Aragonès believes it is absolutely necessary for Sánchez to give him an explanation. “It is a necessary meeting and we will ask for it as many times as necessary”, Plaja expressed while stressing that the Government gains time with the delay, “but the explanations will end up coming”.
But in the meantime, the Generalitat is not keeping its arms crossed and if last week, the Government left in the air the possibility of appearing before the National Court (AN) to denounce the espionage, today Plaja has cleared up the mystery and has confirmed, the Generalitat will be present before this court, as well as before the investigating court number 32 of Barcelona.
In the first, the judges study the case of the telephone interventions to ministers of the Spanish Government, while in the second a case was opened a year and a half ago as a result of the espionage revealed to the former president of the Parliament, Roger Torrent, and to the ERC deputy Ernest Maragall.
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