The judicial scope of the maneuvers of Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo exceeds the limits of the case itself that is instructed against him in the National Court, where he has been investigated since 2017 for leading a macroplot of police corruption. His years of trickery in the shadows have been reflected in the recordings he made for decades, in the notes he made in his diaries, in intelligence reports… A huge amount of material where lies are mixed with truths and insinuations, which Villarejo himself makes an effort to feed to further entangle the investigations. But he is not the only one. Up to a dozen people accused of corruption try to use the Commissioner’s shenanigans in his favor to deflate or annul the cases opened against them in court.
This list is fattened by once famous names, but who have starred in some of the country’s main scandals in recent years. The family clan of former Catalan president Jordi Pujol, his Madrid counterpart Ignacio González or former minister Eduardo Zaplana are among the defendants who present themselves as victims of Villarejo to try to avoid the judicial instructions that accumulate evidence against them.
Zaplana. The PP itself was in charge of putting the ball by bouncing Villarejo to sow doubts without providing evidence about the wasteland case, where Zaplana remains charged for the alleged collection of commissions in exchange for public awards. The Valencian deputy Luis Santamaría launched the following question to the commissioner on October 20, during the open commission in Congress to investigate Kitchen, the espionage operation without judicial control hatched against the former popular treasurer Luis Bárcenas to allegedly seize compromising documents for high positions Of the information.
—Did you participate in any operation against the PP following the instructions of the PSOE? asked the parliamentarian, who has already tried before to discredit the judicial investigations into the Gurtel casewhere his party accumulates two convictions.
“I seem to recall that there was an interest, I don’t know why, in destroying Mr. Zaplana, and a Syrian informant was used, a CNI informer whose name I don’t remember, to see the formulas on how to do it,” Villarejo answered.
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Those words resonated with force and Zaplana, former president of the Generalitat Valenciana and former regional leader of the PP, did not hesitate to pick up the glove and make a move. His defense immediately requested that the commissioner be summoned to testify in the wasteland case and insisted that the procedure accumulates “irregularities”, but the judge rejected it. All this, despite the fact that the former minister had feared at first to end up involved in the Villarejo case as the files intercepted from the police were decrypted, as he admitted in a letter that is part of the summary and that he sent from prison to a former PP deputy, Elvira Suanzes, who was a close collaborator of his.
The Pujol clan. There is still no set date for the trial against the former president and his seven children (Jordi Jr., Marta, Josep, Pere, Oriol, Mireia and Oleguer), but they have already begun to show their cards. According to sources close to them, the members of the clan will wield Villarejo’s maneuvers and the patriotic police, activated in the Ministry of the Interior during the stage of Jorge Fernández Díaz (PP), to try to annul the case. An asset that they already revealed in their defense writings, where they linked the origin of the Pujol case to Operation Catalonia, the informative intoxication campaign supposedly conceived in the Interior to, through alleged police reports with serious accusations of corruption, discredit the main leaders of the Catalan independence movement. “In it, the intervention of Commissioner Villarejo Pérez stands out,” the family highlighted.
The seven children, for whom the Prosecutor’s Office requests sentences ranging from 29 to 8 years in prison, stressed that “a group of officials” of the Police acted “outside all procedural legality” to “activate the report of the complaint ” that would put them on the ropes. In fact, the summary of Villarejo case evidence that this commissioner posed as a lawyer to speak with the businessman Javier de la Rosa and with Victoria Álvarez, the ex-partner of Jordi Pujol Ferrusola, who would end up reporting the alleged irregularities of the clan to the Police. For this reason, the family has requested that Villarejo testify as a witness in the trial. In addition, the eldest son of the former president of the Generalitat tried to appear as an accusation in the Villarejo case, but the judge rejected it on the grounds that the Pujols were a target of police interest and there was no evidence that illegal means had been used against him or his family. .
Ignatius Gonzalez. The former president of the Community of Madrid, epicenter of the corruption plot baptized as Lezo casehas been interested in the Villarejo case. The former leader of the PP already asked in 2019 to appear as injured in the instruction that surrounds the commissioner, considering himself a victim of the “network of recordings and manipulations” of the former police officer, since he recorded it in 2011 and later leaked the conversation where they talk about his Estepona penthouse. A property that the justice investigated due to suspicions that it could reach the hands of González as payment of a commission in exchange for an award, but that ended up filed in 2020 due to lack of evidence.
But the former Madrid president has not stopped there. His defense has gone on the offensive in the Lezo case to try to annul it, after describing it as a “gross montage” orchestrated by Villarejo “on behalf of third parties with the purpose” of sinking him “politically and personally”, according to the letter sent to the National Court and collected by the Europa Press agency. His lawyer has asked to incorporate into the case all the files, audios and emails that the commissioner intervened that could be related to González, as well as a copy of the police agendas. In these notebooks of the agent there are notes referring to “IG”, which the Police have identified as the acronym for Ignacio González: “According to Asturiano, IG must be beaten. He proposes to follow the trail of money”, reads one of February 18, 2013. Asturiano was the alias that Villarejo used to refer to Mariano Rajoy, according to the investigators.
The Lezo case has revealed the alleged looting of the coffers of the Community of Madrid and the public company Canal de Isabel II. After accumulating evidence against the former president —which portrays a politician dedicated to collecting commissions and cheating adjudications—, the Prosecutor’s Office has requested 18 years in prison for González for three lines of investigation of the summary: for the manipulations in the Chamberí golf course ; for sharing a bribe of 1.8 million euros in exchange for awarding the work of the Navalcarnero train for 360 million to OHL; and for devising a plan for Canal to buy the Brazilian company Emissao between 2012 and 2013 for an amount greater than its real value.
Francis Martinez. The former Secretary of State for Security of the Government of Rajoy, prosecuted by the judge as “coordinator” of Kitchen, also tries to annul Villarejo’s audios about his conversations with the driver of Bárcenas, which constitute one of the main pieces of evidence in the investigation about the espionage to the ex-treasurer of the PP. Martinez, ancient hand Right of Fernández Díaz, has appealed the magistrate’s proposal to send him to the bench and has alleged that this “evidence” was obtained “violating fundamental rights or freedoms.” Commissioner José Luis Olivera, former head of the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit (UDEF) of the Police and also prosecuted for his alleged participation in the plot, has joined his request.
In a letter dated October 20 —dated the same day that Public broadcast the audio of a talk between Villarejo and Martínez—, the former Secretary of State accuses the commissioner of keeping “a gigantic file of surreptitious recordings”, which he accumulated “while he was active in the Corps, without any of them being authorized by the competent judicial body”. “They were carried out without the consent of the rest of the interlocutors,” he adds. The former PP politician maintains that, therefore, the audios should be expelled from the investigation as they suppose, in his opinion, “a violation of the fundamental right to the protection of personal data” and “of the right not to testify against oneself and not to confess guilty, because such recordings have been made from a position of institutional superiority (agents of authority or hierarchical superiors) to obtain an extra-procedural confession extracted by deception.”
Louis Pineda. In the summer of 2021, the National Court sentenced the president of the Association of Users of Banking Services (Ausbanc), Luis Pineda, to eight years in prison. The court, presided over by Judge Ángela Murillo (the same magistrate currently directing Villarejo’s first major trial), considered it proven that he extorted companies and banks to pay him in exchange for not taking legal action or smear campaigns against them. The magistrates issued the sentence, appealed to the Supreme Court, after a long oral hearing where Pineda requested the annulment of the process by defining it as a plot hatched by BBVA and Villarejo.
Pineda maintains that the bank paid the commissioner to prepare a complaint that gave rise to the case against him. “[El proceso] It comes from a spurious cause set up by BBVA using police and vigilante structures, in which Villarejo’s role is very decisive,” said his defense. The agents of Villarejo case They found documentation and annotations in the possession of the commissioner about the president of Ausbanc, who appeared as injured in the investigations into the contracts signed between BBVA and Villarejo, which remain open.
But the National Court has already assessed some of these indications and, in its sentence against Pineda, ruled out that the embryonic complaint contained “any defect that implies the violation of fundamental rights” and that the UDEF agents, in charge of the investigations into Ausbanc, they “took advantage” of an “illicit investigation carried out by Villarejo”. That is to say, according to the judges’ conclusion, the evidence was found outside any maneuver by the commissioner.
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