More judicial complaints have been laid over the Catalangate mass espionage. The ERC European parliamentary representative Jordi Solé, through the lawyer Andreu Van den Eynde, lodged a complaint in court on Monday for having been spied on using the Pegasus program, as had been shown by the extensive report by the Citizen Lab research centre. As ERC sources explained, the president of the ERC parliamentary group and of the party's national council, Josep Maria Jové, along with MEP Diana Riba, have now filed complaints, which have ended up in the hands of the investigative court number 24 in Barcelona, after another court, number 32, which had had the earliest Pegasus complaints by ERC leaders on its table since 2020 and has now provisionally suspended its investigation, decided it does not want to process the cases together.
In a statement, ERC said that Solé was also taking legal action against NSO, the company which owns Pegasus spyware, although he also asks for the investigation to focus on Spain's National Intelligence Centre (CNI). The complaint lodged highlights "the gravity of the largest political espionage case ever known to have existed, which violates the secrecy of communications, privacy and, in Solé's case, parliamentary immunity." Of the ERC party members spied on, there is one - the president of Catalonia, Pere Aragonès - who has not yet exercised his right to denounce the crime.
Reclaiming the initiative
Precisely last week, it became known that the judge of investigative court 32 in Barcelona, with the support of the specialized economic offences prosecutor, had refused to add the CUP party's complaint over Catalangate spying to the case opened in 2020, that of senior ERC politicians, Roger Torrent and Ernest Maragall. And in the face of this response, the lawyers representing the CUP, Òmnium Cultural and ERC in the spyware case asked the judges of the courts who currently have charge of their cases, to admit them to proceedings now and to begin the investigation. They also denounced the very different levels of urgency that have been accorded to the espionage investigation, depending on who the victims are: Spain's National Audience is moving at great speed to investigate the case of the Spanish PM and two of his ministers, while the case of the Catalan pro-independence activists and people in their circles is virtually paralysed. For now, there is no response from the three courts in Barcelona, to which the Catalangate complaints have fallen. It remains to be seen how and where the espionage complaint of the Catalan National Assembly (ANC) will proceed.
Israel
Accordingly, criminal lawyer Benet Salellas has sent a letter to court number 21 of Barcelona, to which the complaint of the three espionage victims of Òmnium has been allocated, and to court number 22, where the three affected members of the CUP party have their case, asking that the complaints be admitted for investigation and that the courts begin to follow them up. Van del Eynte has also made a similar request to the judge of court number 24, where the complaints of Jové and Riba have fallen. In addition, both lawyers are asking the judges to join the cases to the rogatory commission to Israel, where National Audience judge José Luis Calama will travel personally, as he himself agreed last week, to question a person with key responsibilities in the NSO company as a witness. This request has also been included in the new complaint of the MEP Jordi Solé.
Those affected belonging to the CUP and Òmnium have filed complaints against the people responsible in the NSO Group, claiming that they are responsible for the misuse of the Pegasus software through having spied on them, and a rogatory commission has also been requested in Luxembourg, the European country where the company has a base, to request information about its relationship with Spain, as it is stated that this malware is only sold to governments. The prosecutor of economic crimes, Roberto Valverde, has stated that since the company has no headquarters in Spain, he lacks jurisdiction to investigate it.