Alicia Sánchez-Camacho

In April 2010, Alicia Sánchez-Camacho was forced to apologize publicly for a diptych with radical xenophobic content with allusions to the skinheads of the city of Badalona, edited by the PP of Badalona (Barcelona), which linked Romanian citizens settled in the municipality with crime and the need for radical population increase to eradicate this "plague".[9] The national leadership of his party had rejected the message the previous day after his complaint by the media. Subsequently, he visited the municipality accompanied by the French MEP Marie Thérèse Sanchez-Schmid to check on the ground the situation of the Romanian Gypsy community in the neighborhoods of La Salut and Sant Roc and hear the testimonies of the neighbors about the alleged bad coexistence with the Romanian community. On that same visit, Sánchez-Camacho asked the government for more border control and defended a "legal and orderly" immigration.[10]

In June 2013, a four-minutes conversation, referred to by the media as Camargate, was made public, held with María Victoria "Vicky" Álvarez (former sentimental partner of Jordi Pujol Ferrusola, Jordi Pujol's son) in the restaurant La Camarga, in L'Eixample of Barcelona, carried out by the Detective Agency Método 3, whose total duration was later uncovered by the Diario Público.[11] The objective of the recording, whose participation Sánchez-Camacho strongly denied at the time, was to launch the so-called "Operation Catalonia", a political plot led by the PP against Catalan sovereignist parties and politicians. Declaring that the Pujol family had a fortune in Andorra would, according to Sanchez-Camacho, later "start Jordi Pujol Ferrusola's imputation". Denying his relationship with the case implied that he loaned false testimony before a judicial declaration and the commission of investigation of the Parlament de Catalunya.[12]

The recording took place on July 7, 2010, and its duration was 2 hours and 22 minutes. First, the employee of Método 3 Alejandro Borreguero came to the restaurant with a vase of flowers that had a built-in microphone inside, and that would serve as a centerpiece. The recordings, which had already begun when the employee entered the restaurant shortly before 2:00 p.m., confirmed a conversation between the agent and a manager in which the assignment of Sánchez-Camacho was alluded to. In addition, he stated that Método 3 would take over the price of the meal. During the recording of the meal, which began after the technician left the restaurant, Sánchez-Camacho declared "Vicky, in the event that we could now do something with all of this, this meal has never happened.", " I have very good contacts inside the police [...] and I knew who they were going to arrest " and, especially, "I have a public prosecutor of my trust". Later, Sánchez-Camacho delivered a report with the results of the recording to the Ministry of the Interior, whose president Jorge Fernández Díaz would later also be involved in the "Operation Catalonia ".[13]