The National Court sentenced Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo to 19 years in prison for the plays “Fer”, “Terre” and “Pintor”, for the crimes of revealing corporate and private secrets and falsifying commercial documents, although that he acquitted him of the crime of corruption and extortion in the degree of conspiracy for which he had been tried.
The Fourth Section of the Criminal Chamber thus dictates a new sentence for this first trial of the “Tandem case”, in accordance with the decision of the Appeals Chamber which annulled the first sentence and forced the sentencing court to evaluate all evidence presented in the trial. hearing and ruling on all crimes that are the subject of the accusation.
In the new resolution, presented by Ángela Murillo and collected by Europa Press, the same magistrates who tried him, after analyzing all the elements of evidence proposed by the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office and accepted by the Appeals Chamber, arrive at the same conclusion as the first time.
Thus, like Villarejo, he condemns ten other people tried in this procedure, including his associate Rafael Redondo, who was sentenced to 13 years in prison for the same offenses as the commissioner.
Nine other people were sentenced to terms ranging from three months to two years in prison, while 16 were acquitted, including Villarejo’s wife Gema Alcalá, his son José Manuel Villarejo Gil, and police officers Constancio Riaño and Antonio Bonilla. In the case of Enrique García Castaño, he was excluded from the trial due to illness.
There was no corruption
With regard to the offense of corruption, it should be recalled that the Appeals Chamber accepted the appeal of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and indicated in its judgment that it could not rule on this type of offense since it had agreed to overturn the sentence so that a new decision would evaluate all the evidence presented during the oral trial.
Now, having examined all the evidence, the judgment of the fourth section analyzes in depth the crime of corruption and the doctrine of the Supreme Court (TS) in the matter to reach the same conclusion of acquittal by understanding that the acts committed by Villarejo were not committed. did not perform them in the exercise of his functions nor were they linked to his public activities.
The Chamber explains that even if the accused knew that Villarejo was an official of the National Police with the rank of commissioner, this is in no way the reason why he was hired “to carry out, in the exercise of his duties “acts contrary to his inherent functions as a private police officer”, as the public prosecutor affirmed, according to the judgment, during the trial.
His services were required, explains the resolution, as the real owner of a large multidisciplinary business network called CENYT, which presented itself on social networks as an intelligence unit dedicated to economic and financial research, adding that he maintained close institutional and operational relations with the State security forces and organs and with the administration of justice, which allowed it to achieve great efficiency.
As in the annulled sentence, this includes a dissenting opinion from judge Carmen Paloma González who does not agree with the criteria of her colleagues and reiterates that Villarejo is the author of two crimes of passive corruption for the contract of his company CENYT in pieces. “Iron” and “Earth”. González also believes that several of the defendants in these pieces should be convicted as necessary collaborators in this crime.
In her dissenting opinion, this judge insists on the fact that to carry out the activities carried out by the CENYT, it was absolutely essential to have the collaboration of the police establishment and that the acts committed by Villarejo and by the people that he used were contrary to the duties inherent to his position.
At this first hearing, the “Iron” article was continued, relating to the hiring of Villarejo by the law firm Herrero&Asociados to obtain information from a competing firm due to the suspicion of having stolen their database. data.
The work “Land”, which focused on CENYT’s commitment to investigate the environment of the owner of PROCISA at the request of one of his daughters, Susana, in the context of a family struggle for inheritance. And in “Pintor”, the mandate of the brothers Fernando and Juan Muñoz Támara in Villarejo was judged to collect information from a former associate, Mateo Martín Navarro, and his lawyer, former judge Francisco Javier Urquía, who would make it possible to decide in their favor. .a tax dispute.
