Spanish govt talks with Catalan separatists in September

Spain’s socialist government and the Catalan separatists have agreed to resume talks in the second half of September, the Catalan regional president announced Tuesday.

The news came a week after nine Catalan political leaders were pardoned and freed from jail for their part in the region’s failed pushed for independence in 2017.

“The resumption of dialogue on the political conflict between the two governments” will take place in the third week of September, Catalan president Pere Aragones told journalists in Madrid.

He was speaking after talks with Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez, who last week freed the Catalan leaders as an olive branch to the movement.

Infrastructure, European funds and central government investment in Catalonia will all be on the agenda at September’s talks, said Aragones.

A few hours earlier, Spain’s Court of Auditors called on 39 former Catalan leaders to pay back 5.4 million euros that they used to pay for advertising abroad.

The money was improperly used between 2011 and 2017 during the Catalan bid for independence, the court ruled. Some of the leaders named in that ruling were those released last week.

Catalonia’s bid to break away from Spain in 2017 provoked one of the worst political crises in Spain since the end of the Franco military dictatorship in 1975.

The leaders of the rich region in the northeast of the Spain, which has a population of 7.8 million people, defied a government ban to organise an independence referendum.

In response, Madrid’s conservative government sent in the police to stop the referendum, and when the region’s leaders declared independence a few weeks later, they sacked them and suspended Catalonia’s autonomy.

Nine Catalan leaders were jailed for between nine and 13 years.

Spain’s socialist leader Sanchez’s recent decision to free the jailed Catalan leaders has been fiercely criticised by the conservative opposition.

The then leader of Catalonia, Carles Puigdemont, fled into exile in Belgium thus escaping trial.