Departures of note

Joan Piqué Vidal was a Barcelona lawyer and professor at the Faculty of Law of the University of Barcelona. He rose to prominence in the 1980s as the defence lawyer for Jordi Pujol, then president of the Generalitat de Catalunya, in the Banca Catalana case, and served as legal counsel to numerous leading figures of the Catalan business elite. In 2005 he was convicted by the High Court of Justice of Catalonia to seven years in prison for his role in an extortion network run with judge Lluís Pascual Estevill. The scheme, active in the early 1990s, targeted businessmen under investigation, who paid money to the judge and agreed to be represented by Piqué Vidal to avoid imprisonment. He was later sentenced to a further year in prison for laundering money for the Sinaloa cartel.