The Pujols, a family under suspicion… the fight is the fight

It was in October 2013 when Jordi Pujol was interviewed by Susanna Griso in “Public Mirror” from Antena-3. The great information mess had just broken out that was caused by the report from the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit of the National Police (Udef) in which they openly spoke of corruption within the Pujols, saying that they had accounts abroad in which They would have hidden a fortune from corruption schemesthe 3% included. The phrase that Pujol uttered during the TV interview went down in history: “What the hell is this about the Udef?”.

Perhaps the patriarch and former honorable did not know the Udef then, but the amounts of millions that the family managed were chilling, the supposedly illicit fortune amassed by the Pujols around 290 million euros. It has been reported that the clan moved up to 3 billion euros in tax havens to hide the money, although not all of that money is necessarily illicit or criminally attributable profit in its entirety.

The Pujol family, or Pujol clan as some call them, has begun to parade before Justice this week to sit in the dock of the accused, including the patriarch and former president Jordi Pujol i Soley, the latter for reasons of age (95) will do so from his home by videoconference. Ultimately it is bad news. Not the fact that they are judged to account for the famous 3%, but that Justice It has taken more than ten years to initiate this judicial process.

However, it was in 2014 when Jordi Pujol assumed in an informative note that he was the owner of the non-regularized money in Andorra and apologized to those who felt defrauded by his conduct. That same note became the death certificate of the party –Convergence– which he himself had founded and with which he governed Catalonia for 23 consecutive years. The famous CiU, which was divided for obvious reasons, was transformed after much confusion in the current Together which Carles Puigdemont still leads.

From that glorious era of pujolismwhere he was valued and respected by a large majority of Catalans, he went to the merciless fall of the Pujol family and everything that smacked of them. Statues of the former president were torn down and streets in his name were erased. How many times will the former honorable have regretted having “put his hand in” -presumably- where he shouldn’t have to get money that he didn’t really need, since the glory he held then could give him all that and much more without the need to become corrupt. Greed is one of the stones that human beings most often stumble over. Above all, humans who have achieved power and then, on top of that, want to take money that is not theirs.