Víctor Terradellas a confidant of the former president Carles Puigdemont who tried to join Russia in the independence cause barely remembers his name
It is enough for him to know that the guy an industrial engineer by profession is a crushed stone patriot who also has a great brain making him the ideal candidate to launch one of the initiatives dreamed of by Puigdemont from his Belgian haven in Waterloo create a cryptocurrency platform El Cabaní
His interlocutor David Madí one of the main detainees last week in Operation Voloh refreshes his memory about the diversion of public funds to the independence movement and the alleged corruption carried out in the shadow of the procés
That conversation put investigators on the trail of Jaume Cabaní Massip 45 The engineer managed together with the businessman Jaume Matamala CatGlobal a company created in Belgium to raise funds with which to defray the expenses in Waterloo of Puigdemont and of the excouncilors fled like him from justice The Consell per la República a kind of parallel government defends that all expenses lawyers security logistics maintenance of the selfstyled exiles are covered with private contributions
The Consells website reports that it has 91535 registered who pay a minimum of 10 euros per year The figure is far from the 10 million euros that Puigdemont believed necessary
But the Waterloo funding has always raised suspicions The researchers working hypothesis not confirmed for now is that part of the money comes from public subsidies from Generalitat bodies that are illegally diverted
And there the figure of the engineer Cabaní appears again In September 2017 he collected 10594 euros from the Platform for Catalan Sports Teams an entity that receives public subsidies for alleged computer maintenance The Civil Guard suspects that it is a false invoice and that the work did not exist
That figure could not be delivered to defray the expenses of a Council for the Republic which did not even exist But Cabaní has opened a way to follow the money trail
The organization was launched at the beginning of 2018 in Brussels and there it settled sheltering Puigdemont the patriot Cabaní My passion is my country he had written in the magazine of the Eduard Soler Foundation where he worked
He was appointed administrator of the nonprofit organization CatGlobal until he left office in April 2019 During that period according to the judicial summary he was the manager of the interests of the former president And he had a role in the cryptocurrency project and the creation of a digital republic in the style of Estonia where Cabaní has a company called Catalitza Oü
Cabaní was the owner of up to five bank accounts abroad three in Belgium and two in Germany a country from which the judge leading the case has requested information The Civil Guard suspects that in those deposits he received public money and supported expenses related to Waterloo
From one of the Belgian accounts Cabaní paid for example the fees of two of Puigdemonts lawyers Paul Beckaert and Till Dunkell He also made a transfer that the investigators link to the birthday celebration of the escaped former Minister of Agriculture Meritxell Serret
The Civil Guard suspects that Cabaní converted the income into cryptocurrencies which he sold to obtain new benefits one of his accounts reflects payments from the Payward company It also points out that CatGlobal donations were managed through payment gateways such as Nationbuilder and Stripe Payments
The researchers add that Cabanís activities are always opaque and place it in a position of maximum relevance at the level of Matamala Sources close to the Consell per la República reduce their political weight and emphasize that they have been out of Brussels for more than a year An email from the director of Òmnium entity that Cabaní also worked with attests to its weight He is the one who set up the Waterloo office and everything that derives from it
The assertions of Víctor Terradellas about the intervention of Russia to support an eventual Catalan republic have served the independence movement to ridicule Operation Voloh which investigates those Russian contacts but also cases of alleged corruption under the procés
In a conversation lasting more than 40 minutes with ERC businessman Xavier Vendrell considered a member of the general staff that helped the Government organize the illegal 1O referendum Terradellas says that in the most tense moments of 2017 Russia offered 10000 soldiers and pay the Catalan debt if Catalonia recognized Crimea Terradellas Puigdemonts henchman and for years head of international relations for the old Convergència goes further in his talk which he recorded behind Vendrells back
Reviewing the key moments of the Catalan autumn of 2017 the conversation takes place in May 2018 he says that to the expresidentit scared him when push came to shove And fantasize about what might have happened The president shit he says he doesnt want to be responsible for killing people and he doesnt want to be responsible or defend you like a ballot box but you need 100 dead
After thinking about the role of NATO in the event of the eventual arrival of a Russian ship to the Catalan coast Terradellas appeals to the need to sacrifice to achieve independence effectively You put a million people in the Plaza de Sant Jaume headquarters of the Generalitat and they will have to kill to enter Vendrell his interlocutor replies We missed the rice There were no balls
