The Appeals Chamber of the National Court, the highest instance of the specialized court, resolved the legal disagreement in the great corruption case known as the Villarejo case. The retired commissioner was ultimately found guilty of corruption, implying that judges consider it proven that to prepare the files on third parties that he sold to private clients, he used his status as an officer of the National Police. What was apparently obvious ceased to be obvious when the criminal court, on three occasions, absolved Villarejo of this crime by separating his status as an officer of the national police from the preparation of the reports that he sold at astronomical prices .
In a ruling known this Wednesday, the Appeals Chamber condemned Villarejo as the author of an offense of passive corruption for the benefits he obtained by carrying out an illicit investigation, and on behalf of Planeta, one of the arbitrators of the sentence he upheld. group with the owners of the Kiss FM station. The commissioner named the July Project and received one million euros, an amount which exceeds the monthly salary of a commissioner by 333 times, the judgment underlines.
For the magistrates, there is no doubt that the commissioner offered his police conditions to investigate alleged arbitral corruption and promised that he would do so unofficially, as well as resorting to “illicit methods” such as consultation of official databases or remuneration of employees. The commissioner investigated the assets of the alleged arbitrator, as well as his personal data and those of his relatives. He never made the investigation official or informed his superiors.
The July Project arrived at the Appeals Chamber because the court that tried Villarejo, headed by the recently retired Angela Murillo, considered that the commissioner prepared his files at the head of his company Cenyt, which offered advice legal and defense as well as research tasks. The conviction for passive corruption means three years in prison for the commissioner, which is added to the dozens to which he has already been sentenced in other rooms.
The Appeals Chamber is a dual body created in 2017 within the National Court following the requirements in this area of the European Union. This chamber reviews sentences handed down by the criminal chamber and its decisions can always be reviewed by the Supreme Court.
The relevance of this conviction for corruption is linked to the efforts of the Section of the Criminal Court which judges the documents of the Villarejo case to acquit the commissioner of the crime of corruption. He did it, for the second time, last October, when he did not appreciate this crime in the orders examined during the first trial against the curator, the pieces Fer, Terre and Pintor. Acquitting Villarejo of corruption and failing to recognize that he used his position as a police officer assigned to the heart of state security has undermined the entire investigation carried out for seven years.
In the case of the trial of the three aforementioned exhibits, the Appeals Chamber ordered the Murillo Section to repeat the sentence because it considered that it had not properly evaluated all the evidence. The court rewrote the judgment and again acquitted Villarejo of corruption. He also did this for the Planeta mission as part of the July project. The anti-corruption prosecution’s appeal against this corruption acquittal is what motivated the Appeals Chamber’s decision.
