On Thursday, 26th January 2017, the newspaper El País published a report on its front page under the title "An ERC senator recognises illegal acts in the Catalan independence process". It went on, inside the paper, to quote the then suspended judge Santiago Vidal: "We have your data illegally" and to give a summary of various speeches given by the senator in various Catalan cities explaining what an independent Catalonia would be like. That report was, in practice, the start of the actions by Barcelona's investigating court number 13 in the large-scale general case against the independence movement that's lasted over two years and the thing which has fostered all the investigations, actions, searches and phone taps which have been carried out since.
Very few days after the news was published, just 18, we learnt that court 13 would open a file on a lawsuit against Vidal for alleged disclosure of secrets, infidelity in the safekeeping of documents and malfeasance presented by Miguel Durán's law firm. Durán being that famous former director general of ONCE, who went everywhere as a talking head, ended up a member of Unió and in 2009 headed the list of candidates for the European election for the Libertas-Ciudadanos coalition in Spain, which included Albert Rivera's party. A party, Ciudadanos, which was then unknown, founded in 2006 and which that same years would earn three seats in the Catalan Parliament.
It's good to remember all of this on the day that court 13 has decided to prosecute as many as thirty high-ranking officials from the Catalan government and the Catalan Audiovisual Media Corporation (CCMA) -which encompasses public broadcasters TV3 and Catalunya Ràdio- but not over what the investigation was started to look into, but over the October 2017 referendum and, of course, Santiago Vidal isn't among them. The former senator who, furthermore, the Supreme Court allowed in March to restart his legal career. Vidal was in 2017, simply, a scapegoat, like Carles Viver i Pi-Sunyer, who has also been under investigation for two years whilst it was said and published that they were being investigated for rebellion and sedition. As everyone knows, the judge who opened the case, Juan Antonio Ramírez Sunyer, died last November, and for whom the chair of the Supreme Court and the General Council of the Judiciary, Carlos Lesmes, had a heartfelt acknowledgement in a letter in which he said without beating around the bush that he "changed the path of our country's history".
The new head of court 13, Alejandra Gil Llima, accuses the 30 of different combinations of misuse of public funds, disobedience, false documentation, disclosure of secrets and malfeasance, and sets a ridiculous shared security of 5,803,068.67€, with the threat of confiscating their assets if it's not paid. That's what the general lawsuit is about more than anything: intimidating specific members of the independence movement so that it doesn't happen again in the future.