Supreme Court judge Pablo Llarena confirmed that, in his opinion, the amnesty law does not eliminate the crime of embezzlement attributed to Carles Puigdemont and former ministers Toni Comín and Lluís Puig. The magistrate rejected the appeal that the former Catalan president filed against his first decision in this regard: “They decided to make public funds provided by taxpayers pay the cost” of the 2017 process to organize the referendum on October 1, said the case instructor.
Neither the magistrate who investigated the bulk of the trial, nor the Criminal Chamber, which judged and sentenced the case, have accepted to apply this rule to the crime for which the leader of Junts and now a member of the Catalan Parliament is still being prosecuted. The survival of the charge of embezzlement is what, to this day, keeps the national search and arrest warrant against Puigdemont active after the tsunami case for terrorism was archived due to an error by Judge Manuel García Castellón.
One of the decisions taken in this regard included a dissenting vote by Judge Ana Ferrer, Llarena’s roommate. In this new order, the instructor responds that “in more than 200 years of jurisprudence of the Spanish Supreme Court, there is not a single resolution” that authorizes amnesty for Puigdemont’s malfeasance.
