Last six arrested officials walk free

There is no let up in the Span­ish au­thor­i­ties’ legal pur­suit of pro-in­de­pen­dence lead­ers. No sooner had the last six of­fi­cials ar­rested on Wednes­day been re­leased by a Barcelona judge, than the state pros­e­cu­tor filed a sedi­tion law­suit for or­ga­niz­ing the protests on the same day the ar­rests took place. The suit sin­gles out ANC pres­i­dent, Jordi Sánchez, and Òmnium Cul­tural pres­i­dent, Jordi Cuixart, while also yes­ter­day the gov­ern­ment warned that the cen­tral gov­ern­ment is look­ing into tak­ing over con­trol of the Cata­lan po­lice, the Mossos d’Es­quadra.

With the re­lease of the six of­fi­cials yes­ter­day, all 14 of those ar­rested dur­ing the Span­ish po­lice raids on Wednes­day are now free, in­clud­ing the econ­omy min­istry heads, Josep Maria Jové and Lluís Sal­vadó. Nev­er­the­less, all of the of­fi­cials de­tained were charged with mis­use of pub­lic funds, con­tempt, and per­ver­sion of jus­tice, with some also charged with sedi­tion, which comes with prison sen­tences of up to 15 years.

The six ar­rested of­fi­cials re­leased yes­ter­day ex­er­cised their right to re­main silent and did not an­swer any ques­tions put to them ei­ther by the judge or the pros­e­cu­tor. Al­though re­leased they will have to re­port to the judge on a weekly basis. The of­fi­cials af­fected are Rosa Maria Rodríguez Curto, di­rec­tor of T-Sys­tems ser­vices, Pep Ma­so­liver, di­rec­tor of in­for­ma­tion for the Punt.​cat foun­da­tion, the head of Strat­egy and In­no­va­tion at the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment’s Cen­tre of Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions and In­for­ma­tion Tech­nol­ogy, Josuè Sal­lent, and em­ployee of the Con­sorci d’Ad­min­is­tració Oberta, Juan Manuel Gómez.

As part of the case against them, the judge is in­ves­ti­gat­ing whether the Cata­lan gov­ern­ment has spent the 6.2 mil­lion euros set aside in the bud­get for prepar­ing the ref­er­en­dum sus­pended by the Con­sti­tu­tional Court.