Víctor Terradellas, former head of Convergència Democràtica de Catalunya (CDC), this Thursday before the judge who held two meetings with the then president Carles Puigdemont in les Cases de les Canonges, his official residence, in which a group of Russian citizens participated presented themselves as emissaries of the Russian Government. In one of those meetings, held before October 27, 2017, the day of the unilateral declaration of independence (DIU), he was Nikolay Sadovnikov, a former diplomat who was linked to the Russian Foreign Ministry until 2018, according to Italian diplomatic sources. Terradellas, declared for three hours as accused of alleged diversion of funds through subsidies, specified, however, that he acted on his own behalf and not on behalf of the former Catalan president.
Terradellas admitted before the Barcelona judge Joaquín Aguirre that he had two meetings with Puigdemont with Russian envoys who had come to him from the hand of the Catalan businessman Jordi Sardà Bonvehí (reported in 2012 by Gas Natural for a gas business in Ukraine). In the first of these meetings, Sergei Motin (deceased) participated, and the second was East and Nicolay Sadovnikov. Judicial sources explained that the former CDC official confirmed that in these meetings, “the envoys from the environment of the Russian Government”, as defined by the accused, offered Puigdemont financial aid when Catalonia was independent and the sending of 10,000 Russian soldiers. He scheduled these interviews on October 23 and 24, days before the DUI, although the international consortium of journalists has credited Sadovnikov with traveling on October 26. In one of these meetings, according to the same sources, was present the former leader of Junts Elsa Artadi, who resigned last week as the party’s candidate for mayor of Barcelona. This newspaper has tried on several occasions to collect her version. The Russians asked in exchange for favorable legislation to turn Catalonia into a cryptocurrency niche.
The two trips to Moscow
The former CDC wanted to make it clear that the contacts with this Russian plot were in a personal capacity and that “nobody” and, above all, not even Puigdemont made any assignments in this regard. “It was on his own initiative,” he explained to Thurs. This relationship, he acknowledged, lasted throughout 2018. He even assured that he traveled to Moscow in September 2018 to hold a meeting with Nikolay. Before the unilateral referendum of 1-O he had already gone to the Russian capital, where he had a meeting with the former deputy of that country Sergey Markov, as declared by Terradellas himself. “I was on my own,” he repeated. The sources consulted detailed that in the interrogation he stressed that he “did not work” for Puigdemont
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Terradellas, assisted by the lawyer Francesc Sánchez, specified that before the offer of those Russian emissaries Puigdemont was left with a “stunned face” and said nothing, for which he was asked by the judge about the expression “he has shit in his panties ” that he used when he explained the Russian offer of economic and possibly military aid to David Madí, a former senior CDC official, and Xavier Vendrell, former ERC minister, both members of the former president’s so-called ‘General Staff’. The defendant assured that this was a very Catalan expression that could have many meanings. The audios of these conversations were found on Terradellas’ mobile phone, although he denied that he recorded it.
A part of the interrogation focused on the alleged diversion of funds through subsidies from the Barcelona Provincial Council when this entity was directed by CiU. In this sense, he denied that the NGO he directed, CatMon, was a “money launderer for the procés”, while he argued that the funds were used for the purposes for which they were granted. He explained that all financial and grant matters were handled by him now. deputy of Junts in the Parlament, Francesc Dalmases.