Judge Pablo Llarena has closed the case he instructed in the Supreme Court against Carles Puigdemont and has transferred to the Criminal Chamber the final decision on the application of the amnesty law. The magistrate, according to an order reported by Europa Press, thus concludes his investigation phase and leaves the extinction of criminal liability in the hands of the body that tried the case.
The investigating judge, who investigated the procés, also lifts the indictment of Toni Comín and Lluís Puig, and maintains the same thesis he had already anticipated in October: the amnesty is applicable to the crime of embezzlement for which they were prosecuted.
Amnesty advances, but the Supreme Court retains the final procedural word
Llarena maintains that the doctrine established by the Constitutional Court in the ruling that granted protection to former counselor Dolors Bassa is extensible to Puigdemont. With this criterion, he dismissed the appeal filed by Vox's popular prosecution against his decision to annul the arrest warrants against Puigdemont, Comín, and Puig.
The magistrate recalls that the Constitutional Court's resolution must be applied, even if he does not share its reasons, and emphasizes that his disagreement cannot condition or delay compliance with what was resolved by the court of guarantees. In that same order, moreover, he reproached the constitutional body's ruling for a lack of "moderation".
The October decision, he now insists, was limited to the lifting of the arrest warrants and did not amount to definitively closing the procedure. Nor did it replace the corresponding resolution on the extinction of liability and dismissal, a task that the judge himself now refers to the Criminal Chamber. The Chamber has already applied the amnesty to former vice president Oriol Junqueras and former counselors Dolors Bassa, Raül Romeva, and Jordi Turull, in a line that now again marks the path of the still pending parts of the case.
The judge maintains the evidence, but separates it from the effect of the law
Llarena states that the amnesty law for the procés, in force since 2024, and the protection granted a month ago by the majority of the Constitutional Court, its so-called progressive sector, prevent maintaining Puigdemont's prosecution. The order recalls that this doctrine rules out that the public financing of the October 1, 2017 referendum constitutes, by itself, the personal patrimonial benefit that excludes amnesty.
At the same time, the instructor clarifies that the impossibility of continuing with the criminal prosecution does not derive from a general decriminalization of embezzlement or disobedience, nor from the disappearance of the evidence that led to the prosecution. The case is affected, according to his reasoning, by the legislative decision to amnesty the investigated conduct and by the scope given to it by the majority of the Constitutional Court.
The magistrate adds that there is still evidence of Puigdemont, Comín, and Puig's involvement, the same evidence that supported their prosecution in 2018. In that resolution, they were accused of having used the powers of their positions in the Govern to organize and finance the 1-O referendum with public funds, disregarding the prohibitions of the Constitutional Court and the High Court of Justice of Catalonia, as part of a strategy aimed at unilaterally imposing independence outside the constitutional order and the autonomous statute.
Puigdemont and Comín lose another avenue in the Supreme Court, but do not recover an open case
In another order also reported by Europa Press, Llarena has dismissed the appeals by Puigdemont and Comín to have the case referred to the courts of Catalonia after "the charge of sedition disappeared". The judge responds that he retained the Supreme Court's jurisdiction because the investigated embezzlement included acts of contracting and disposal of funds carried out outside Spain.
"That the expenses were charged to a department based in Barcelona does not mean that all the necessary acts to carry them out were executed there," the magistrate reasons. With this argument, he rejects the claim to send the case to the Catalan jurisdiction.
Llarena also rules out that the parallel processing of a case before the Court of Accounts constitutes a double prosecution of the same facts. And he specifies that this last dismissal does not modify the lifting of the national arrest warrants agreed last month, which remain without effect.
