The name of Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo resonates again, this time as being involved in the investigation sent to prison by former Barça president Sandro Rosell. According to information published by The newspaper, who has had access to documents, witnesses and recordings, there is evidence that Commissioner Villarejo was the one who launched the investigation against Rosell irregularly. As part of Operation Catalonia, the state sewers, then led by Mariano Rajoy, conspired in 2014 to open an investigation without judicial control with Rosell as the target. Following this framework, three years later, in May 2017, Rosell was arrested, who was in pre-trial detention for almost two years, until he was acquitted in a trial held in the National High Court. Rosell was accused of putting the Barça club at the service of Catalan independence.
Until now, it was believed that the investigation that officially sent Rosell to prison had begun in 2015, and that he was under summary secrecy until 2017, when he was arrested. But according to the newspaper, there is a recording of the day of the arrest of the former Barça president in which a Spanish police officer is heard calling José Luis Pérez, the author of the complaint, to thank him for his collaboration in the case. Villarejo had contacted him in 2014. In Villarejo’s own newspaper there is an entry from January 10, 2014 related to the investigation that had already begun against Sandro Rosell.
