A Court of Accounts well past its expiry date, which for weeks has been sitting on its decision over the financial guarantee for 5.4 million euros from the Catalan Institute of Finance (ICF) for the civil bail of about thirty former Catalan government officials, moved very quickly on Thursday morning to dust off the document. Just when it had learned, through the media, that the PSOE and PP had reached an agreement for the renewal of several bodies whose mandates had expired, including the public auditing tribunal itself.
In case there are still any doubts about the politicization of the whole process, I think it could just about be said that, here, we are closer to revenge than to justice. The Court of Accounts - which in reality is not a court of law but a body composed of party representatives that is honouring the name by which it is known, the Court of Vengeance - when faced with such a controversial decision has not taken the most elementary response. That is, it has not left the decision to the incoming members of the tribunal, but has shown, once again, that it acts to prioritize the relentless persecution of an ideology.
With regard to the assets of senior figures as significant as the former Catalan presidents Carles Puigdemont and Artur Mas, an assets seizure order has been issued to claim the respective bail quantities of 2 million and 2.8 million euros, attributed to them as those who held ultimate responsibility for their governments' foreign policy action between 2011 and 2017. The same goes for the former vice president Oriol Junqueras, the ex-ministers Andreu Mas-Colell, Francesc Homs and Raül Romeva and high-ranking officials of the time, persecuted by a discredited body with an obvious political bias.
The clearly political nature of the decision to reject the ICF financial guarantee for the bail sums of the pro-independence leaders is beyond all doubt. The date chosen to announce it, with the tribunal's members close to leaving their posts, with the Court's mandate expired since last July, and coinciding with the second anniversary of the verdict in the Supreme Court leaders trial is anything but a coincidence. Among other things, because the persecution since the summer of 2017 has been orchestrated by Spain's deep state, always at pains to show that the repression remains intact and never lowering its guard whatever voluntary or forced contortions the pro-independence politicians make. The script of the deep state is not that of the Moncloa government palace.
A new Court of Accounts might have added to the balance sheet such obvious things as the fact that the Council of Statutory Guarantees had unanimously approved it, that the state solicitor representative at the Court of Accounts did not take a stand and passed the decision to their superior, who in turn did nothing but maintain the ambiguity, declining to give the affirmative answer of rejection of the guarantee that the Court of Accounts hoped for. Moreover, in its decision on the matter, the state solicitors' office drew the auditing tribunal's attention to the fact that the Spanish government had not appealed the guarantee formula as well as noting the various obstacles that the plan had overcome.
The Catalan economy minister, Jaume Giró, creator of the political, economic and legal artifact to cover the public servants, has announced an appeal, which does not paralyze the assets seizure order but, depending on how quickly the handover to new members is carried out, may mean that it will no longer be the presently-constituted Court of Auditors which has to decide. I doubt there is room for it to change its mind, but when you are in a match - even if the referee is on the opposing side - you have to return all the balls that come at you, even when it seems impossible to win the point.