Bewilderment. A prosecuting councillor at Spain's Court of Accounts has issued a decision this Wednesday denying permission for Catalan president in exile, Carles Puigdemont, to be interrogated via video conference, a practice that was admitted in the preliminary hearing for the same case on December 6th, 2022, at the proposal of co-defendants Lluís Puig, Josep Manuel Suárez and Martí Anglada. Councilor Elena Hernáez, of the auditing tribunal's prosecution area, states that the request "was not made with sufficient advance notice to be able to be processed in the terms provided by the law". She maintains that the applicants "have had almost a year to be able to make their request and, nevertheless, they have not formulated it until four days beforehand, this Monday" for the trial of 35 ex-officials of the Catalan governments led by Artur Mas and Carles Puigdemont over the spending on the referendum of 1st October 2017 and on Catalonia's foreign action campaigns. The trial is set down for this Friday. Gonzalo Boye, lawyer for Puigdemont, Toni Comín and Clara Ponsatí, has already announced that he will file an appeal against this decision.
The Prosecutor's Office claims a total of 3.2 million euros in civil liability from the 35 people on trial, for the spending on these independence process activities. Societat Civil Catalana, the anti-independence civil group which is conducting a private prosecution in the case, calculates at, and claims, 5.3 million for the same expense areas, the 1-O referendumn and the promotion of Catalonia abroad between 2011 and 2017.
ERC requests suspension due to the amnesty
For its part, the Catalan Republican Left (ERC) has announced that the defence lawyers for the party members of Esquerra Republicana indicted in the case submitted a letter to the court this Tuesday afternoon requesting the suspension of the trial scheduled for this Friday, as well as all court procedure, pending the approval of the amnesty law, registered this Monday in the Congress of Deputies, which would, once it entered into force as law, cause this case to be annulled. ERC cites that among the defendants who are members of the party are the former Catalan vice-president Oriol Junqueras, and former ministers Raül Romeva and Dolors Bassa, as well as others who were high officials in the Generalitat, such as Aleix Villatoro, Josep Ginesta, Sergi Marcén, Erik Hauck, Maria Kapretz and Ewa Cylwik.
Puigdemont's difficulty, not "sufficiently justified"
In the tribunal's ruling, councillor Hernáez concludes that "when only two days remain until the trial, it is not possible to process the request made by the three co-defendants", consisting of interrogation via the video conference system". She argues that in order to approve this exceptional modality for the hearing of evidence, "as contained in articles 169.4 and 313 of the civil procedure law (LEC)", it has not been "sufficiently justified" why the appearance of Puigdemont is "impossible or very onerous", and "nor have they presented their request with sufficient and reasonable notice in order for this councillor to have been able to adequately assess" the exceptional circumstances, and set up a video conferencing system.