The Fourth Criminal Chamber of the National Court sentenced 19 years in prison to Commissioner José Manuel Villarejoin parts Iron, Land and Pintor for the crimes of revealing business and private secrets and forgery in a commercial document and acquits him of the crime of bribery and extortion in the degree of conspiracy for which he had been tried.
The Court issued a new judgment, of 508 pages, on this first trial of the Tándem case, in accordance with the judgment of the Appeals Chamber which annulled the first and obliged the Fourth Section to evaluate all the evidence presented during the hearing. and adjudicate all crimes that may be charged.
However, the same magistrates, after having analyzed all the elements of evidence proposed by the Anti-corruption prosecution and which the Appeals Chamber accepted, reaches the same conclusion as the first time. So, like Villarejo, condemns ten other people who were tried in these proceedings, including his partner Rafael Redondo, who was sentenced to 13 years in prison for the same crimes as the commissioner. Nine other people were sentenced to sentences ranging from 3 months to two years in prison, while 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.
Concerning the offense of corruption, 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 accepted the cancellation of sentence so that a new decision can evaluate all the evidence presented during the oral trial.
Now, once all the evidence has been examined, the judgment analyzes in depth the crime of corruption and the doctrine of the Supreme Court on the matter to arrive at the same conclusion of acquittal understanding that the acts committed by Villarejo did not not been accomplished during the exercise of his function nor were they linked to his public activities.
The Chamber explains that even if the accused knew his status as a civil servant of the National Police Corps with the rank of commissioner, this is in no way the reason why he was hired, “to be carried out in the exercise of his duties as a police officer acts contrary to the duties inherent to one who acts as a private police officer”, as the prosecution affirmed, according to the judgment, during the trial.
His services were required, he explains, 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 relationships with the state security bodies and forces 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 disagrees with the criteria of her colleagues and reiterates that Villarejo is the author of two corruption offenses responsibility for the involvement of his company Cenyt in the Iron and Earth plays, as well as several of the defendants in these plays who, according to this judge, should be found guilty as necessary cooperators of this crime.
In her dissenting opinion, this judge insists on the fact that to carry out the activities carried out by Cenyt, it was absolutely essential to have the collaboration of the police establishment and that the acts committed by Villarejo and by the people he used were contrary to the duties inherent to his office.
In this first hearing, the iron piece 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 . The play Land, which focused on the hiring of Cenyt to investigate the entourage of the owner of PROCISA on the orders of one of his daughters, Susana, in the context of a family struggle for inheritance, while at Pintor the mandate of the brothers Fernando and Juan Muñoz Támara went to Villarejo to collect information from his former associate, Mateo Martín Navarro, and his lawyer, former judge Francisco Javier Urquía, in order to allow them to resolve a dispute tax in their favor.
