Thursday, March 28

The judge archives the Russian plot of the procés in which he implicated the head of Puigdemont’s office


One of the two branches of the alleged Russian plot of the procés has been archived this Friday. Judge Joaquín Aguirre has shelved the investigation of an oil deal allegedly linked to contacts with Russia in Carles Puigdemont’s environment in which he implicated businessman Aleksander Dmitrenko and the head of the former president’s office, Josep Lluís Alay.

Josep Lluís Alay, head of the Puigdemont Office: “I have never sought the support of the Kremlin”

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In an order, to which elDiario.es has had access, Judge Aguirre concludes that “there is no solid evidence” to suspect the sale of oil in which Dmitrenko, a Russian businessman based in Catalonia, participated. The judge considers that the operation “lacks commercial sense”, but decides that it is not criminal, as maintained by both the defenses and the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office.

Judge Aguirre opened the separate piece based on a report from the Civil Guard on Alay’s phone, arrested in 2020 in the Voloh case operation, and the messages that he crossed with Dmitrenko a few months earlier. The messages referred to a purchase of oil that a Chinese company made from a Russian one in which Dmitrenko allegedly participated and about which he spoke with Alay. The businessman congratulated “all of us” and celebrated having received a $295,000 guarantee for the operation as “the first big step taken.”

Judge Aguirre considered that the operation could imitate the one carried out by Russia with a company linked to the Italian politician Matteo Salvini and that it offered indications of “being nothing more than a screen to hide some type of irregular operation”, such as “illegal financing of a political party. The prosecutor, on the other hand, considered that the instructor was going too far in his investigation hypothesis and on several occasions asked to file the case.

Thus began another piece about the eventual Russian influence in the sovereignist process, in this case during the years 2019 and 2020 and with Alay and Dmitrenko as protagonists. The judge has another line of investigation open, which has not been archived, on the Russian contacts of the former leader of Convergència Víctor Terradellas on the most tense dates of October 2017. The rest of the pieces of the Voloh case on alleged corruption of leaders are also still active in the shadow of the process

The oil business

In his statement last May, Dmitrenko disassociated any pro-independence leader from the operation and maintained that the joy shown in the messages with Alay responded to the fact that the business was going to report “benefits” to the Barcelona Chamber of Commerce and Catalonia through the payment of taxes. To file the case, the judge has based both on Dmitrenko’s statement and on the study of his motive.

According to Dmitrenko’s account, it was “important for Catalonia” to have “good relations” with Russia in order to obtain economic benefits, but he denied that he was seeking political support from the Kremlin for independence. Finally, the purchase was not completed in its entirety and Dmitrenko did not receive any amount for the intermediation, a thesis that the judge accepts when he concludes that “it cannot be determined if the operation actually took place.”

The Russian oil plot led to a new confrontation between Judge Aguirre and the anti-corruption prosecutor Fernando Maldonado, who opposes several lines of investigation in the Voloh case. In a harsh letter from a year ago, the prosecutor reproached the judge for “lack of logical motivation for the investigation” and its “prospective nature”, while concluding that deducing criminal conduct from the messages between Alay and Dmitrenko “exceeds the powers of investigation that corresponds to any authority”. The Barcelona Court, however, agreed with the judge, who after investigating has shelved one of the legs of the Russian plot of the procés.



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