The High Court of Madrid (TSJM) has partially overturned the ruling under which Eugenio Pino, deputy chief director of operations for the Spanish National Police, was acquitted in July 2020, and has sentenced him to one year in prison for a crime of disclosure of secrets, after he passed on a pendrive containing personal and business data on the case relating to the family of former Catalan president Jordi Pujol to the Spanish police forces's economic and fiscal crime unit as well as to the country's intelligence agency, the CNI.
The case was the first to go to trial involving the so-called "patriotic police" unit believed to have been created during Mariano Rajoy's PP government and to have carried out numerous operations against Catalan and pro-independence leaders. The conviction of Pino follows hard on the heels of the revelation on Tuesday of new audio recordings made by former police commissioner José Manuel Villarejo - also a key figure in the "patriotic police" - giving hard data over the 'dirty op' known as Operation Catalonia, led by the interior ministry under Jorge Fernández Díaz (PP) and aimed at Catalan political leaders who were leading the independence movement, which was beginning to boom at the time, in the years after 2012. The audios that El País published detail that the intention was to search for possible bank accounts belonging to ex-president Jordi Pujol in Switzerland in order to end his political career. However, no bank statement linked to the Pujols was ever found in Switzerland, as Spanish police never went to search the Swiss bank - due to lack of any evidence.
Pino gave information to the CNI
In a ruling announced this Friday, the Madrid court upheld the appeal filed by Jordi Pujol Ferrusola, the eldest son of the former Catalan president, sentencing Pino not only to prison, but also requiring him to pay a fine of 7,200 euros and to compensate Pujol Ferrusola to the sum of 2,000 euros.
The judges agree - in opposition to what was concluded by the Provincial Court of Madrid - that Pino committed a criminal offence when he supplied the 'pendrive' containing information from Pujol Ferrusola to the CNI, the economic and fiscal unit and the investigating court number 5 of the National Audience, without warning "the judicial authority at any time to of the illicit origin of the evidence".
The TSJM reviewed the decision under which Pino was acquitted after Pujol appealed the decision of the Madrid Provincial Court in August 2020 and demanded that the former high-ranking police chief be sentenced to two years' imprisonment for a crime of disclosure and revelation of secrets.
Pino denied everything
The court's decision comes after Pino said in court in February that "there was no intention to harm the Pujol family" in the handover of the information to the police unit that was separately taking part in the National Audience court's investigations on the origin of the family's fortune. "There was no intention to harm the Pujol family, it was just collecting the evidence and sending it to the judicial authority through my subordinates," he said during the TSJM hearing to consider the appeal.
In a brief appearance before the court, Pino repeated the version he offered at the trial in 2020 in the Provincial Court of Madrid, explaining that the 'pendrive' was handed over to a "chief commissioner" and saying that he had ordered it to be returned to the economic and fiscal crime unit envisaging that the then investigating judge, José de la Mata, would assess the evidence.
For his part, Pujol Ferrusola's lawyer, Cristóbal Martell, said that, although he agreed with the sentence in which Pino could not be given the two-and-a-half year sentence that he initially requested for a crime under article 198 of the Penal Code, he should have received the longer sentence taking into account the "common trunk" of the revelation and disclosure of secrets in article 197, punishable with two years' jail.
Spain's patriotic police
The "Pendrive case" against former senior police officer Eugenio Pino was the first accusation to go to trial involving the so-called "patriotic police" brigade, a grouping of senior police officers allegedly set up during the Partido Popular government of Mariano Rajoy to conduct operations aimed at political opponents of the government, among them, the Catalan independence movement. Former police commissioner José Manuel Villarejo was prominent in this grouping and his extensive audio recordings of conversations with associates have played a part in bringing to light its activities. Spanish prime minister Pedro Sánchez went as far as confirming the existence of the irregular police unit in the Congress of Deputies in 2020, asserting that the interior minister Marlaska was at that time "rooting out" its members.