The National Audience (AN) sentenced the commissioner to 19 years in prison Jose Manuel Villarejo for the coins “Iron”, “Land” and “Pintor” for the crimes of revealing corporate and private secrets and falsification of a commercial document, although this acquits 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 therefore dictates a new decision on this first trial of the “Tandem affair”, in accordance with the decision of the Appeals Chamber according to which canceled the first sentence and required the sentencing court to evaluate all evidence presented at the hearing and to rule on all crimes charged.
In the new resolution, presented by Ángela Murillo – recently retired -, the same magistrates who tried him, after analyzing all the evidence proposed by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and accepted by the Appeals Chamber, reached the same conclusion than the first time.
So, like Villarejo, condemns ten other people who were tried in these proceedings, including his associate Rafael Redondo, who was sentenced to 13 years in prison for the same offenses as the commissioner.
Others nine people were sentenced to prison terms between 3 months and two years in prisonwhile 16 were acquittedincluding Villarejo’s wife, Gema Alcalá, his son José Manuel Villarejo Gil, as well as 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, once all the evidence has been examined, the judgment of the fourth section analyzes in depth the crime of corruption and the doctrine of the Supreme Court (TS) on the subject to reach the same conclusion of acquittal.
“The acts committed by José Manuel Villarejo were not carried out in the exercise of his functions and were not linked to his public activities,” specifies the judgment.
The court assures that “the activity carried out” by the now retired commissioner “was in no way intended to undermine the legitimacy and performance criteria of the Public Administration, but rather to obtain greater private benefits by offering a range of hard-to-obtain services. obtain, except by legal means.
The magistrates emphasize that “There is no record of payments made by clients to public officials. to obtain data. “Furthermore, there was no relationship or connection between these and those, the only connection being Villarejo,” they add.
At this point, the sentence recalls that to commit the crime of corruption “the active subject must attempt to corrupt the authority, the official or the person who participates in the exercise of a public function with an offer or with the delivery of ‘a gift’. or remuneration for the purpose of carrying out an act contrary to the duties of his position or an act typical of his position.
He acted “in the private sphere”
“This offer or giving of a gift or remuneration could also have the aim of not carrying out or delaying an act which should be carried out,” he adds.
The magistrates maintain that “the objective data detected consisting in the fact that the invoices issued to Fer et Terre did not integrate the concepts or services provided does not convert these payments into gifts typical of a corruption offensesince in reality they wanted to conceal the activities actually carried out.
The court understands that Villarejo “acted in an absolutely private and non-public domain, even if, to obtain the information requested from him by Cenyt’s clients, he took advantage of his status as a public agent.”
Thus, they affirm that the “admittedly significant sums that these clients paid for the professional services entrusted to the multidisciplinary company, well above the market price for this type of actions, do not transform them into typical gifts of the corruption”.
The judgment concludes that Customers didn’t go to Villarejo because he was a police officer“despite his status as a civil servant” and boasting “of this public knowledge, his solvency and his efficiency”. “In no case has an active commissioner of the National Police been entrusted with work linked to his police activity,” he declared.
A judge disagrees
As in the overturned sentence, this includes a dissenting opinion from Judge Carmen Paloma González that does not agree with the criteria of his colleagues and reiterates that Villarejo is the author of two corruption crimes responsibility for the contract of his company CENYT in the parts ‘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.
