Catalan Socialist resigns from party executive over spying case

The former organization secretary of the PSC, the Catalan branch of the main opposition Socialist Party (PSOE), José Zaragoza, has provisionally resigned from the federal executive committee of the PSOE in the wake of a police report that concluded that his grouping had paid a private detective agency to find out where a town mayor from the conservative Popular Party (PP) lived.

Socialist sources said Zaragoza will step down “until his participation” in the alleged probe he ordered the Método 3 agency to carry out against Badalona Mayor Xavier García Albiol “is clarified.” He will keep his seat in Congress. After the case first broke in February, Zaragoza stood down from his position within the executive team of the PSC Catalan Socialists.

The police report also found that the PSC had paid Método 3 1,750 euros to record a private meeting of the leader of the PP in Catalonia, Alicia Sánchez-Camacho, and Victoria Álvarez, the former girlfriend of Jordi Pujol Ferrusola, the son of a long-serving former Catalan premier of the center-right CiU nationalist bloc.

Zaragoza’s resignation came on the heels of remarks earlier Wednesday by Socialist leader Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, who said he found spying for political reasons “repugnant,” adding that if the PSC had contracted the services of a private detective agency for this purpose, it “would have to take decisions.”