Josep Lluís Alay records his trips to Moscow
The director of the office of President Carles Puigdemont, Josep Lluís Alay, has deposited before a notary a signed statement detailing the reasons for his three trips to Moscow between 2019 and 2020. These trips have been the subject of legal proceedings against him .
The first visit for academic and professional purposes
The first trip that Alay made to Moscow was in March 2019. On this occasion, he went as the head of Puigdemont’s office to study the possibility of holding a conference in the Russian capital and to contact the media interested in interviewing him. In addition, this trip also had an academic content related to his position as professor of contemporary history at the UB.
The other two trips for personal and academic purposes
The other two trips Alay made to Moscow, in June 2019 and February 2020, were personal and focused on his side as a historian. On these trips, Alay continued his academic research and collected relevant documentation. To demonstrate the academic research objective of these trips, Alay deposited copies of the documentation he had collected.
Documents deposited before a notary public
Among the documents that Alay filed before a notary to make available to Judge Joaquín Aguirre, there is a card with the authorization to access the state archive of the Russian Federation, where he looked for information related to Presidents Francesc Macià and Lluís Companys. He also collected information about the Brufau-Civit sisters, two Catalans exiled to the Soviet Union after the Spanish Civil War and who ended up working as KGB agents. In addition, Alay located an eleven-page typescript dated 1925 containing handwritten notes from President Macià.
Other documents that Alay collected in Moscow include a 14-page typewritten report with handwritten notes from the secretary of the executive committee of the Communist International dated October 27, 1925. This report contains Francesc Macià’s request for support for the movement against the dictatorship of Primo de Rivera and against the war in Morocco.
In addition, Alay found documents related to Carme Brufau, an exile in Moscow in May 1939. Among these documents is an application for work as an announcer in Catalan at Radio Moscow, dated December 1939. deposit the document that Brufau presented with his biographical data.
All this documentation, together with the statement filed before a notary public, has been available to the judge since December 2020, pending Alay’s summons to testify.
