Friday, March 29

Jordi Pujol returns to the radio after his confession and avoids putting his hand in the fire for all his children


The beginning of summer seems to have become the time chosen by Jordi Pujol to occasionally return to the media arena. If last year he presented his political testament in the form of memoirs, this July 1 he has granted an interview to Josep Cuní in SER Catalunya in which he has described his situation as “painful”, although it has not been entirely catastrophic . “I live installed in pain, but I keep hope”, he has expressed.

The Prosecutor’s Office asks for 9 years in prison for Jordi Pujol for creating a “patronage network” from the Generalitat

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Both nouns are not accidental: they are part of the title of his book published last year between pain and hope (Proa-Enciclopèdia) the book-interview in which Pujol apologizes for having kept undeclared money for decades in Andorra, denies being corrupt and declares himself a Catalan nationalist, not an independentist.

The main novelty this Friday is that the former president has avoided putting his hand in the fire for all his children, who will sit next to him on the bench of the National Court due to the origin of the funds. “I haven’t received a single peseta”, he stressed, to immediately refer to his descendants: “A person can do something… Not everything has gone well enough, but for the vast majority of my family I put my hand in the fire”. Implicit reference to the eldest son, Jordi Pujol Ferrusola, and who according to the Prosecutor’s Office was the manager of the family fortune?

Beyond this small lack of trust in some of his children, the former president’s Catholic faith, very present in the book, has also emerged in the Radio Barcelona studio. “In difficult times you have to have strength, one of the virtues that the catechism explained, and hope,” said the former president on account of the pressure from the PP political police on Andorran banks to get their accounts.

“It is clear and evident that there was an operation to try to harm me, one takes note but you have to count on it, it has not surprised me at all,” Pujol asserted, without further evaluation.

On a political level, Pujol has recognized that he has identified himself as a “nationalist” since he was 14 years old, although he has added that he has never felt independent; and he has affirmed that he sees Catalonia as “sad” and that the pro-independence politicians “underestimated” the capacity of the State to respond to the procés.

On July 25, 2014, Pujol revealed in a brief statement to the media that his wife Marta Ferrusola and their children had kept hidden abroad “money” from a “deixa” -legacy- of his father Florenci that, “unfortunately ”, the family had not had the opportunity to regularize.

While awaiting a date for the trial, the Prosecutor’s Office accuses Pujol of the crimes of illicit association and money laundering, for which he is asking for a sentence of nine years in prison, and for his children he proposes sentences that add up to between 8 and 29 years, the most severe for the eldest son, Jordi Pujol Ferrusola, who for this reason has already spent seven months in preventive detention.



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