2023-07-24 22:45:12
One of the main accusations on which the macro-cause against José Manuel Villarejo is based, the bribery, falls apart. The first sentence of the National Court against the retired commissioner acquits the police officer of this crime on the grounds that he charged private clients for dossiers against third parties, but that the preparation of these works was not “in the exercise of his position” as a policeman but at the head of his company Cenyt.
Justice declares firm the acquittal of Villarejo in the case of the recording to the CNI
Further
The Criminal Chamber has sentenced Villarejo to 19 years in prison for various crimes of revealing secrets. This accusation and that of bribery are repeated in most of the more than 30 pieces that are open in the Tándem case against the commissioner and sources of the investigation assure that the sentences for the second – the charge in exchange for police work – will depend on the case-by-case study, although they acknowledge that the precedent of the acquittal in the National Court is not rosy at all. Pieces like the one that will predictably judge the security directors of Repsol and Caixabank may be affected by the sentence on Monday. In this branch of the case, the Prosecutor’s Office requests 40 years in prison for him.
The legal question seems complicated. How is it possible that Villarejo’s status as a policeman was separated from obtaining confidential information that he later sold to his clients? The court goes on to say that, if he paid other policemen for it, it made no difference that he also belonged to the Security Forces and that anyone else could have paid for that information.
The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office is studying the 350-page sentence, made public yesterday, to decide whether to appeal Villarejo’s acquittal for bribery and other aspects of the ruling. Sources from the Public Ministry affirm that the doctrine of the Supreme Court establishes that the actions for which the public official is charged do not have to take place in “strict compliance with his duties” but rather that they can be determined by his status as a police officer and that this would be enough to convict for that crime.
During a large part of the investigation and the trial, the question was whether the clients knew that Villarejo was a police officer when they hired him, but the Criminal Chamber insists in its sentence that this is not essential to convict for bribery, but rather whether the commissioner obtained the confidential information during his assignments, the last one in the Deputy Operations Directorate of the Police, to which they responded negatively.
His clients knew he was a policeman
In this first trial, three orders were judged by the commissioner: that of a law firm that wanted to harm other lawyers who had worked in it until they created their own office (Iron piece), that of members of the García Cereceda family confronted by an inheritance (Land piece) and that of two business brothers, one of them the husband of Ana Rosa Quintana, who wanted to harm a rival with personal information (Pintor).
In all of them, the sentence says, Villarejo did not intend to “undermine the legitimacy and criteria of the action of the Public Administration”, that is, twist the actions of other officials at will, a necessary requirement to be guilty of bribery. What the commissioner was pursuing with his work at the head of Cenyt was “to obtain greater private benefits by offering a series of services that are difficult to achieve, at least through legal channels,” the ruling adds.
In the case of the lawyers, they did not know at first that Villarejo was a police officer, although they did know him later. In the case of the political family of the presenter Quintana, they did know it from the beginning, as did Susana García-Cereceda. In all cases, however, the fact that they knew he was a police officer is not decisive in convicting them of bribery.
The judges say: “His services were required as the real owner of a large multidisciplinary business network called Cenyt, which advertised itself on social networks as an intelligence unit dedicated to financial investigation, adding that it maintained close institutional and operational relations with the State Security Corps and Forces and with the Administration of Justice, which allowed it to achieve large doses of efficiency.”
It is precisely this publicity that the magistrate Carmen Paloma González uses to issue a particular vote against the acquittal of the crime of bribery signed by her colleagues Ángela Murilla (president and speaker) and Fermín Javier Echarri. Cenyt’s advertising as “an intelligence unit dedicated to economic and financial investigation” with the contacts and relationships cited “evidence, logically, the use of the police establishment or the ‘guild’, as it appears in some conversations, for the success of Cenyt’s activities.” With the trick of the particular vote of Judge González, she will be able to count on a possible Anti-Corruption appeal before the Supreme Court.
The acquittal for bribery is a new setback to the cause. The most relevant defendants in the same have been falling out of the case. Two years ago now, Judge Manuel García Castellón closed the accusation against María Dolores de Cospedal, considering that the meetings he held with Villarejo were of a “social” nature and did not constitute orders to sabotage the case for Box B of the Popular Party. In that same piece, Kitchen, García Castellón gave up investigating the possible participation of Mariano Rajoy, former president of the Government.
What remains of the Kitchen piece is saved
However, the acquittal for bribery will not affect the piece Kitchen, in which the former Minister of the Interior Jorge Fernández Díaz and his number two Francisco Martínez are still accused. That political commission was not from a private client and what allegedly occurred in the maneuver was an embezzlement of public funds.
Another relevant piece of Tandem, number 21, can indeed be affected by the ruling on Monday. In the same, Repsol and Caixabank were being investigated for commissioning the commissioner to sabotage the maneuver of the Mexican Pemex to take control of the Spanish oil company through the construction company Sacyr. García Castellón, in a decision ratified by the Criminal Chamber, left out the CEOs of Repsol, Antonio Brufau, and Caixabank, Isidro Fainé, as well as the companies as legal persons, attributing exclusive responsibility for hiring Commissioner Villarejo to their security directors.
The security directors knew perfectly well that Villarejo was a policeman, but according to the thesis of the court that has just acquitted him of bribery, the commissioner bought call traffic from another policeman, Enrique García Castaño, who cannot be tried due to his delicate state of health. And that purchase was made by Villarejo as director of Cenyt and not as a policeman assigned to the heart of state security. What happened during the BBVA commissions to the commissioner and which constitutes another separate piece where the bank and its then president Francisco González are accused.
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