Jaume Roures, one of the owners of Mediapro and the man who skilfully consummated the economic ruin and resulting decline in influence of the Prisa group and the newspaper El País by winning the battle for football rights, has been on the state's radar for some time. He's not a typical businessperson, among other factors because he defines himself as left-wing and pro-Catalan. Something not particularly common with the level of business success Roures has had, where certainly the establishment expects him to be right-wing and anti-Catalan. He doesn't support independence, he says that repeatedly, but on other occasions also adds that certain events, like the repression on 1st October or the continued imprisonment without bail of the prisoners in Estremera and Soto del Real generate strong feelings of sympathy in him. He also has a good relationship with Pablo Iglesias, and has sometimes considered himself close to his party, Podemos.
The appearance of his name in a Civil Guard document speculating on the possibility that he was part of the 1st October referendum's executive committee and also at the head of the independence process's communications strategy has little semblance of being real. Among other reasons, there is plenty of everything from very serious information to fiction about the months and weeks before the referendum and the meetings held, and Jaume Roures doesn't appear. Telephone conversations between third parties cannot give credibility to something which is purely speculative. In any case, the jump to the media has been made: first some time ago was the newspaper El Punt Avui and now Roures.
So, why the interest in Roures? Basically for three reasons: he set up at Mediapro the international press centre to follow the referendum and put it at the disposition of the Catalan government, the parliamentary groups, the political parties and the pro-independence organisations to make their public appearances. Several hundred journalists from all over the world worked from there with the technology and facilities you would expect of a world-leading communications group having paid a symbolic quantity.
The other two reasons are both to do with documentaries he was involved in producing: the first was called Las cloacas de Interior (Spain – The State’s Secret Cesspit) and was a report on the Spanish Interior ministry's dirty war against the independence movement. Although no statewide channel broadcast the documentary, it being limited to TV3 and Euskal Telebista, the Catalan and Basque public broadcasters, its spread online has been notable and the images of the cesspit fabricating evidence to incriminate pro-independence leaders has seriously harmed the government. The second was a documentary about the 1st October broadcast more recently recording the arrival of the ballot boxes at the polling stations, that day's police violence and the repression of the independence movement and the members of the public gathered at the voting locations.
These three situations seem to have placed Roures in the crosshairs. The rest is a lot of smoke and nothing else.