Miquel Roca, 80 years of a man from Barcelona | People

Catalonia was known only a decade ago as an oasis of political peace and complicit silences in which the heroes of a moderate bourgeoisie moved the strings. They were friends despite their differences, they coincided at parties, in pleasant Mediterranean summers, in patronages and on boards of directors. The unilateral independence process devastated that ruling class that sought understanding with the rest of Spain. On April 20, one of the last referents of that time celebrated its eightieth anniversary: ​​the lawyer and rapporteur of the drafting of the Spanish Constitution Miquel Roca.

The celebration was in the privacy that confinement due to the coronavirus pandemic. Roca did not answer questions from this newspaper about whether he could blow out the candles accompanied by his wife, Anna Sagarra Trias. It is likely that her four children had to resign themselves to a congratulation from a distance: Joan, the eldest son and CEO of the Roca and Junyent law firm; Berta, communication manager; Agnès, interior designer; and Helena, director of sponsorship, patronage and events at the Liceu theater. Roca explained in 1994 in an interview with EL PAÍS, on the occasion of the end of his stage as a deputy in Congress, that it had been thanks to becoming a grandfather that he had known his children better. “In these 17 and a half years [como diputado] my children have grown almost without me ”.

The love between Sagarra and Roca arose in the youth vacations in El Port de la Selva, the town of the Costa Brava where the lawyer assures that he is truly happy. Roca, founder of Convergencia Democrática de Catalunya (CDC), a party now disappeared and led by his mentor and at the same time rival Jordi Pujol, is a regular in Port de la Selva, especially lover of going out on his boat. Discreet, he lets himself be seen as one more neighbor buying bread or strolling through its streets on days when the tramuntana wind does not let him sail.

His house in this Empordà municipality is one of his most precious assets, and it was because of it that he suffered a serious displeasure, according to the journalist José Antich in the book The Viceroy. Roca led the Reformist Operation in 1986, a candidacy from Catalonia to govern Spain. He had the backing of the CDC and the collaboration of friends such as the current president of Real Madrid, Florentino Pérez, or the businessman in the advertising sector Leopoldo Rodés. The Reformist Operation was an electoral disaster and Rodés demanded, to compensate his economic investment in the campaign, that Roca transfer his home to him in Port de la Selva, according to Antich. The politician was able to save the house thanks to Pujol’s intervention.

Roca was born in 1940 in Bordeaux, where his father, also a lawyer and politician Joan Baptista Roca Caball, had to go into exile during the Civil War. Roca Caball was the founder of the Christian Democrat Unió Democrática party and also director of Fútbol Club Barcelona during the Republic, a passion for the Blaugrana team that he transmitted to his son. The family returned to Barcelona in 1941. The one who was a benchmark for the democratic transformation of Spain studied at the Virtèlia school, a school with a progressive and Christian model of education for wealthy families. In Virtèlia students such as Roca, Pujol, the architect Ricardo Bofill, the publicist Luis Bassat, the ex-director general of Unesco Federico Mayor Zaragoza or the ex-mayor of Barcelona Pasqual Maragall coincided.

Roca made lifelong friendships in that childhood and later combative youth against Francoism. Roca’s law firm is one of the most outstanding in Spain for the large companies and prestigious surnames it represents. One of the firm’s last two most popular cases was the representation of the Dala Galí Foundation in the false claim of paternity against Salvador Dalí by the fortune-teller Pilar Abel, which led to the painter’s exhumation in 2017. More famous still was the defense assumed by Roca of the Infanta Cristina in the Nóos case. The trial ended with Cristina’s acquittal but with a lucrative civil liability sanction for the crimes of embezzlement and fraud, for which her husband, Iñaki Urdangarin, was sentenced to prison.

Roca, a man whose allies but also his rivals have highlighted the capacity for dialogue, has maintained a fluid relationship with the highest authorities of the State. The socialist José Antonio González Casanova maintained close contact with Roca in the anti-Franco struggle and later during the work of drawing up the Magna Carta. In his memoirs, González Casanova pointed to the suspicions that Roca’s father generated in his son’s involvement in the construction of a new Spain: “His father told me that Miquel was worth a lot but that he was a botifler, derogatory term used against those sold to Spanish nationalism ”.

Four presidents of the Government offered him to be a minister, the last one, José María Aznar. Roca himself has highlighted that the least formal occasion was with a demotivated Leopoldo Calvo Sotelo, who proposed it to him during a lunch, among yawns. That did not prevent one of the former president’s sons, Pablo Calvo Sotelo, from being one of the star lawyers of the Roca Junyent law firm. Roca explained to the journalist Gemma Nierga in 2017 that being a minister did not take away his dream, and that his illusion would have been to be mayor of his city, as were his good friends Narcís Serra and Pasqual Maragall. The three, heirs of an enlightened and Catalan bourgeoisie, were protagonists of decades of successes such as the birth of democracy, the self-government of Catalonia or the Olympic Games, an era that today, however, is more questioned than praised.

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