The National Court has decided to reduce the sentence of Carlos Salamanca, former chief commissioner of Madrid-Barajas airport, to 3 years and 3 months in prison in the Villarejo case. Salamanca was accused of having received gifts between 2010 and 2015 from businessmen in exchange for preferential treatment to their clients and relatives when they arrived at the airport.
The reduction of more than two years in the sentence is due to the fact that the magistrates of the Fourth Section of the Criminal Court have corrected “the contradictions and lack of clarity” that the Court of Appeal attributed to the original sentence. For this reason, the Court decided, on July 10, to annul the sentence – he had been sentenced to 5 years and 8 months in prison – and to repeat the sentence again. Now, the judges have modified the classification of the crimes of passive bribery, which entails a reduction in the duration of the sentence, according to the sentence to which Europa Press has had access.
On the other hand, the court has decided to maintain the three-month prison sentence imposed on the lawyer Francisco Menéndez, convicted of a continuing crime of active bribery committed by an individual, with the analogous mitigating circumstance of highly qualified collaboration.
Both defendants have been acquitted of the aggravated continuing crimes against the rights of foreign citizens in the form of promoting illegal immigration, as well as the continuing crime of administrative prevarication.
According to the proven facts, Salamanca received various “luxury” gifts between 2016 and 2017, including “high-end cars,” “luxury watches,” money and trips worth close to half a million euros, from Menéndez. These gifts were intended to obtain preferential treatment for the lawyer, his Equatorial Guinean clients and their families upon arrival at Madrid airport. However, the ruling states that there is no evidence that such preferential treatment “was materialized in specific acts that benefited these passengers.”
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