José Luis Olivera: commissioner willing to fabricate false accounts

José Luis Olivera is one of the four diners at the meal recorded by Villarejo in which the two policemen speak with the journalist Antonio García Ferreras and the director of Atresmedia Mauricio Casals about the “gross” information from Okdiario about an alleged account (which never existed) by Pablo Iglesias in a tax haven and how it had been replicated by La Sexta.

During this relaxed chat, a high-ranking police officer hints that false evidence can be fabricated against rivals. “That it is not very expensive to put an account into Pablo Iglesias from 5 years ago and then explain it,” Olivera contributed to the conversation about the manipulation of documents.

Another recording of a meal, this one belonging to the part of the Villarejo file that escaped the control of the commissioner and that appears in the court case, describes even better the relevance that Olivera has had in national politics in recent years. In this case, the guests are all regulars in the summary of the Tándem case: the businessmen Adrián de la Joya and Alberto Pedraza, the lawyer Javier Iglesias, ‘El Largo’, and the commissioners Villarejo and Olivera. Except for Pedraza, all are charged. The five appear planning to make Olivera operational director of the Police with the PP, after Eugenio Pino, the architect of the political brigade, had retired and with Juan Ignacio Zoido at the head of the Ministry of the Interior.

Olivera’s appointment would mean absolute freedom for his maneuvers and a guarantee of impunity. The argument that they were going to present to María Dolores de Cospedal is that Olivera would be his perfect instrument in the “war” that he had with Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría. With the lawyer Iglesias present, whom they consider to be his link with Mariano Rajoy, they say that José Luis Olivera also suits the president, the “Asturian”.

But it is then that Villarejo alludes to what would be one of the most serious actions committed by the Villarejo organization on political grounds, the controlled blasting of the Gürtel case so that it would not reach the leadership of the PP, years before it was open the piece of box B.

Villarejo affirms: “Apart from being the most ideal person [Olivera] It’s that he’s spent his whole fucking life doing favors, man, for these people, damn it. That in 2009, this man and I were risking that pal Rucalcaba, we were seeing him and he was ambushed in the fucking car so they wouldn’t bite us, man, eh, for the fucking Gürtel issue… That Gürtel could have [al PP]come on, I could have sent them all to fuck if it hadn’t been for this one… and I can’t forget that in the fucking life, huh”.

Villarejo, Ana Rosa and Inda

It is not a new issue in the Villarejo audios. Precisely at another meal, this time, again with journalists, the retired commissioner alludes to that maneuver. It occurs just the day before the meeting between businessmen and policemen mentioned in the previous paragraph. Now, they accompany Villarejo Ana Rosa Quintana; her husband, Juan Muñoz; and the director of Okdiario, Eduardo Inda. They allude to the policeman’s political leanings and he says that his “experience” with the PSOE is “much better than with the PP.” “For me, the PSOE has made me earn dough, it has given me honors, it has done to me I don’t know what and such. And the PP, nothing else that has given me the ass (…) I shit on the whore, in 2009 if it hadn’t been for an asshole named Villarejo he hid a hundred boxes of Gürtel let’s see, let’s see… it would have ended The whole game…”

At lunch with the businessmen and collaborators, Villarejo explains how far the Gürtel case would have gone if it had not been for him and Olivera. Lawyer Iglesias says: “Starting with the boss.” “For the shit of the boss,” says Villarejo. “For the one with the mustaches”, concludes the lawyer Iglesias, referring to José María Aznar. In one of its reports, the Internal Affairs Unit refers to these comments as “express mentions of a job to protect the Gürtel investigation, betraying Alfredo Pérez Rubalcaba, then Minister of the Interior.”

Investigator and suspected informer

Since the winds of the polls began to predict an end to the socialist cycle in Spain, at the end of the second term of office of José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, rumors about Olivera’s repositioning spread through the Police. Against him, who had been denounced in court by the PP as part of a “police clique” dedicated to fabricating evidence against the party in the Gürtel case. “I have created the catastrophe for the Popular Party,” Olivera defended himself before the investigation by the Congress commission. During it, the PP spokesman, Luis Santamaría, defended Olivera without fissures: he read the policeman’s resume and at the end he divided it to reproach the PSOE that that was how little the commissioner’s career mattered to him.

The storm of the Villarejo case had brought José Luis Olivera some Anticorruption conclusions that transformed rumors into presumed certainties. Villarejo had telephoned Ignacio López del Hierro, businessman and husband of Cospedal, to warn him of phone taps and future searches of party members in the Valencian branch of the Gürtel case and another called Brugal, on garbage management in Alicante. “According to the content of the conversations, the chief commissioner of the UDEF at that time, José Luis Olivera Serrano, would have provided that information,” says an Anti-corruption report from July 2019.

Internal Affairs also attaches information on the constitution of a Villarejo company with the chief inspector on leave Antonio Giménez Raso in which Olivera would take “5%” of what was invoiced. The company was established in 2008 when José Luis Olivera was still head of the elite anti-corruption police unit.

In Villarejo’s conversations with Giménez Raso, the former describes his gang’s alleged collaboration with Olivera’s UDEF: “We give them the data, they score the point and we get paid”. The investigators suspect that Olivera not only “scored” but also received a bite. The tracing of Olivera’s known accounts has not been successful, although his knowledge and his alleged participation in espionage on Luis Bárcenas with reserved funds has cost him prosecution.

For the imputation of Olivera in Kitchen, the statement of his former subordinate, the chief inspector Manuel Morocho, directly responsible for the investigation of Gürtel and box B, was decisive, who described in parliamentary and judicial headquarters an unbreathable climate of pressure so that he did not advance in his investigation of the corruption of the PP. In them, according to Morocho, Olivera participated, keeping reports of the case secret to negotiate with the PP until offers for him to leave outside Spain, coming from Minister Fernández Díaz himself.

At the start of Operation Catalunya

Something that all the police officers that make up the Villarejo group share is their ability to present themselves to the government on duty with a card that could read “very necessary, ready for anything.” Partisan logic dictated that after being the head of the Gürtel case unit, Olivera would end up parked in an office with barely any powers. But a few months later he was appointed by the PP government as head of the Intelligence Center against Organized Crime (CICO), without great operational skills but with information. Over time, Olivera would direct an even more relevant organization, adding terrorism to the tasks of knowledge and coordination of it.

Two months after beginning his destiny in the CICO, Olivera reappeared in the media. He had transcended his trip to Barcelona on October 29, 2012, accompanied by another commissioner, Marcelino Martín Blas-Aranda, then head of Internal Affairs, and another of the protagonists of the PP political brigade until he clashed with Villarejo. Operation Catalunya, uncovered by elDiario.es in 2014, had just started.

Olivera and Martín Blas tried to convince prosecutors Fernández Bermejo and Sánchez Ulled to immediately relaunch the investigation of the Palau case, despite the fact that neither of them had any connection with the case, and to ask the judge to register the CDC headquarters. . Catalonia was in electoral pre-campaign. The prosecutors distrusted that two police officers close to the police leadership, but without any connection with the case, presented them with those new and flimsy clues. The actions of the policemen even motivated a formal complaint from the Fiscal Council, but the two commissioners were decorated with the Red Medal, a pensioned recognition.

In October 2019, Olivera went on to the second activity to work at the Royal Spanish Football Federation, chaired by Luis Rubiales, as “risk manager in the Security Area”. Currently he is retired. He still continues to value Villarejo’s contributions in such important anti-corruption operations as Malaya or Astapa. Olivera seems the only one who hasn’t abandoned him yet.