The Appeals Chamber of the National Court, the highest instance of the specialized court, has resolved the legal discrepancy that was going through the great corruption case known as the Villarejo case. The retired commissioner has finally been convicted of bribery, which implies that the judges consider it proven that to prepare the dossiers on third parties that he sold to private clients, he used his status as an official of the National Police Corps. Something that was apparently evident ceased to seem so when the Criminal Court, three times, absolved Villarejo of this crime by separating his status as a national police officer from the preparation of the reports that he sold at astronomical prices.
In a ruling known this Wednesday, the Appeals Chamber has condemned Villarejo as the author of a crime of passive bribery for the profits he obtained by having illicitly investigated, and on behalf of Planeta, one of the arbitrators of the award that he maintained. this group with the owners of the Kiss FM station. The commissioner named the July Project and received one million euros, an amount that exceeds the monthly salary of a commissioner by 333 times, the ruling highlights.
For the magistrates, there is no doubt that the commissioner offered his conditions as a police officer to investigate an alleged arbitration bribery and promised that he would do so unofficially, as well as the use of “illicit methods” such as consultations of official databases or remuneration to collaborators. The commissioner investigated the assets of the suspected referee, as well as his personal data and those of those close to him. He never made the investigation official or informed his superiors.
The July Project has reached the Appeals Chamber because the court that tried Villarejo, with the recently retired Ángela Murillo at its head, estimated that the commissioner prepared his dossiers at the head of his company Cenyt, which offered legal advice and defense as well as tasks research. The conviction for passive bribery means three years in prison for the commissioner to add to the dozens to which he has already been sentenced in other pieces.
The Appeals Chamber is a double instance created in 2017 within the National Court after requirements in that regard from the European Union. This chamber reviews the sentences handed down by the Criminal Chamber and its decisions can still be reviewed by the Supreme Court.
The relevance of this conviction for bribery has to do with the efforts of the Section of the Criminal Court that judges the pieces of the Villarejo case to acquit the commissioner of the crime of bribery. He did so, for the second time, last October, when he did not appreciate this crime in the orders examined in the first trial against the curator, the pieces Iron, Land and Pintor. Acquitting Villarejo of bribery and not recognizing that he used his position as a police officer assigned to the heart of State security shook the entire investigation that has been carried out for seven years.
In the case of the trial for the aforementioned three pieces, the Appeals Chamber ordered the Murillo section to repeat the sentence because it considered that it had not correctly evaluated all the evidence. The court rewrote the ruling and again acquitted Villarejo of bribery. He also did it for Planeta’s assignment in the July Project. The appeal of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office against this acquittal for bribery is what motivated the ruling of the Appeals Chamber.
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