The National Court has sentenced Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo to 19 years in prison for the pieces ‘Iron’, ‘Land’ and ‘Pintor’ for the crimes of revealing company and private secrets and falsifying commercial documents, although he acquitted him of the crime of bribery and extortion in the degree of conspiracy for which he had been tried.
The Fourth Section of the Criminal Chamber thus dictates a new sentence on this first trial of the ‘Tandem case’, complying with the decision of the Appeals Chamber that annulled the first sentence and forced the sentencing court to evaluate all of the evidence presented in the oral hearing and to rule on all the crimes that are the subject of the accusation.
In the new resolution, presented by Ángela Murillo and collected by Europa Press, the same magistrates who tried him, once they have analyzed all the evidence proposed by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and accepted by the Appeals Chamber, reach the same conclusion as the first time. .
Thus, like Villarejo, he condemns ten other people who were tried in this procedure, among them his partner Rafael Redondo, who has been sentenced to 13 years in prison for the same crimes as the commissioner.
Another nine people have been sentenced to sentences of between 3 months and two years in prison, while 16 have been acquitted, including Villarejo’s wife, Gema Alcalá, his son José Manuel Villarejo Gil, as well as the 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 bribery
In relation to the crime of bribery, it is worth remembering that the Appeals Chamber upheld the appeal of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and indicated in its ruling that it could not rule on this type of crime since it had agreed to annul the sentence so that a new ruling would assess the all of the evidence conducted in the oral trial.
Now, once all the evidence has been examined, the Fourth Section ruling analyzes in depth the crime of bribery and the doctrine of the Supreme Court (TS) on this matter to reach the same acquittal conclusion by understanding that the acts carried out by Villarejo did not carry them out in the exercise of his position nor were they related to his public activities.
The Chamber explains that although the accused knew that Villarejo was an official of the National Police Corps with the rank of commissioner, that was not in any case the reason why he was hired “to carry out in the exercise of his police position acts contrary to his inherent duties acting as a private police officer,” as, according to the ruling, the Public Prosecutor’s Office maintained in the trial.
His services were required, the resolution explains, as the real owner of a large multidisciplinary business network called CENYT, which advertised itself on social networks as an intelligence unit dedicated to economic and financial research, adding that it maintained close institutional and operational relationships with the State Security Forces and Bodies and with the Administration of Justice, which allowed it to achieve large doses of effectiveness.
As in the sentence that was annulled, 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 crimes of passive bribery for the contracting of his company CENYT in the pieces. ‘Iron’ and ‘Land’. González also believes that several of the accused in these pieces should be convicted as necessary collaborators in this crime.
In her dissenting opinion, this judge insists 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 position.
In this first hearing, the piece ‘Iron’ was prosecuted, relating to the hiring of Villarejo by the Herrero&Asociados law firm to obtain information from a competing firm due to the suspicion that he had stolen their database.
The piece ‘Land’, which focused on the hiring of CENYT to investigate the environment of the owner of PROCISA at the behest of one of his daughters, Susana, in the context of a family struggle over inheritance. And in ‘Pintor’ the mandate of the brothers Fernando and Juan Muñoz Támara to Villarejo was judged to gather information from a former partner, Mateo Martín Navarro, and his lawyer, former judge Francisco Javier Urquía, which would allow them to resolve in their favor. a tax dispute.
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