Although the former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont celebrated yesterday the ruling of the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) on the amnesty, the truth is that he will have to wait for the resolution of his appeal for protection in the Constitutional Court next autumn to fully benefit from the application of the Law that eliminates the crimes of the procés.
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The reason lies in the fact that the Supreme Court continues to think that one of the two reasons why it refused to erase the crime of embezzlement from 1-O – the one related to “the purpose of obtaining a personal benefit of a patrimonial nature” – remains intact. Legal sources consulted by EL MUNDO explain that the ruling of the Court of Luxembourg has not ruled on this legal argument and, therefore, there is no reason for the 1-O judge, Pablo Llarena, to change his criteria.
When the procés judge refused to amnesty the crime of embezzlement of public funds attributed to Puigdemont, he cited two reasons. The first, that the actions of the former president of the Generalitat compromised the financial interests of the European Union – an argument that has now been discarded by the CJEU – and the second, because the Law itself excluded amnesty for that appropriation of funds carried out with the purpose of obtaining a benefit of a patrimonial nature.
In the order issued on July 1, 2024, Llarena argued that Puigdemont and the former ministers Antonio Comín and Lluis Puig had “the ultimate decision on the availability of public funds entrusted to the Government of the Generalitat of Catalonia and that they used them to cover the costs inherent to the referendum they themselves wanted to promote. (…) They were the ones who conceived the plan to achieve the independence of Catalonia and adopted a government agreement signed by all of them to assume certain bills from their departments. Consequently, the acts of disposal of the Administration’s assets were radically linked to a personal benefit and had a marked patrimonial character, having allowed the defendants to obtain certain goods and services without diminishing their pecuniary or patrimonial assets.”
The 1-O judge reasoned that “nothing prevented the legislator from amnestying any embezzlement that only met temporal and tendential requirements” since he did so with the crimes of disobedience, prevarication, or usurpation of public functions, but not with embezzlement. Legal sources consulted indicate that, regarding the benefit of a patrimonial nature, the “CJEU ruling has not changed anything since the provisions of the Amnesty Law remain the same”.
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Currently, the judge maintains the national arrest warrant against Carles Puigdemont and does not foresee deactivating it, according to what this newspaper has learned.
Likewise, it happens that the Criminal Chamber reasoned identically to Llarena when it refused to amnesty the embezzlement of the rest of the procés leaders: former vice president of the Generalitat Oriol Junqueras and former ministers Raül Romeva, Jordi Turull, and Dolors Bassa.
All of them have appealed for protection before the Constitutional Court chaired by Cándido Conde-Pumpido. Although the court of guarantees can – and it is expected to happen from October onwards – uphold the protection claims of the independence leaders, Supreme Court sources emphasize that the interpretation of a Law is a matter of “ordinary legality” that corresponds to them. In this context, Puigdemont will have to wait longer to claim victory.
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