According to an international investigation led by the OCCRP (Organized Crime and Coprruption Reporting Project), Bellingcat and the Italian IRP in addition to several Spanish media, former Catalan president Carles Puigdemont would have met with representatives of the Russian government, days before the Unilateral Declaration of Independence (DUI) at the end of October 2017. One of the media that echoed it was El Plural.
In El Plural, among other things, they published thathe main interlocutor of the meeting would have been a “Putin envoy” named Nikolai Sadovnikov. “This is supported by an international investigation led by OCCRP and in which El Periódico has participated,” they specified.
During the meetings, the emissaries of the Kremlin would have offered to help finance Catalonia, and very specifically to cancel the public debt it had with Spain, once the new Catalonia approved legislation favorable to cryptocurrencies in exchange for their support.
They would also have promised the autonomous city 500,000 million dollars, as well as 10,000 Russian soldiers.
“In addition, OCCRP assures that on one occasion the independentists received a BTC with a value at that time of a little less than 10,000 dollars,” they published in another part of the El Plural article.
As explained, the former Foreign Secretary of Convergència, Víctor Terradellas, would have met in Moscow in the spring of 2018, with the businessman Nikolay Sadovnikov, considered as “Putin’s envoy and from then until his arrest, he would have tried to raise Russian funds for the Catalan cause.
According to sources who would have been present at that meeting, the former president of Catalonia would have received the request from the Russian envoys, that he convert the “new independent Catalonia in a kind of tax haven for cryptocurrencies”, thus creating a central bank that would work in Bitcoins outside the laws of the European Union (EU).
For his part, in the circle of the former Catalan president and himself, they have always maintained that Terradellas acted on his own.
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