Four antiterrorist police officers charged for leaking data to Villarejo for BBVA

The judge of the National Court Manuel García-Castellón, instructor of the Villarejo case, has issued an order in which he cites four agents of the National Police who allegedly provided the retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo with confidential information of fifteen people for BBVA. They are a chief inspector, a deputy inspector and two officers, all of them assigned to the General Information Commissariat, responsible for the fight against terrorism, who between 2014 and 2016 allegedly consulted in five police databases restricted use data of 15 people, including a Bulgarian citizen who shared a cell with the president of Ausbanc, Luis Pineda, whom Villarejo had spied on for the financial institution. The magistrate will take statements from the four agents accused of the crimes of revealing secrets and bribery. Two of them already appear as being investigated for similar events in other pieces of the macrocause in which the parapolitical plot of the commissioner is investigated, in prison since his arrest in November 2017.

The citation of the four policemen comes at the request of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office after a report from the Internal Affairs Unit allowed the identification of the agents who, during those two years, entered police databases to extract information that Villarejo later included in four reports that he sent to BBVA, and which are investigated in item 9 of the summary. The investigations have revealed that the financial institution paid the police for the services it provided for 14 years about 10.3 million euros. The judge’s order highlights that for this, the retired commissioner obtained “a huge amount of personal data related to the people under investigation, a good part of which is accessible through the different files and police applications”, whose content it cannot be transferred “to private entities”, as the magistrate emphasizes.

The judge’s order highlights that, on November 10, 2016, one of the police officers now accused allegedly entered the Adexttra database (which includes, among others, personal data, address, passport and images of foreign citizens) to obtain information on eight Bulgarian citizens, including Pineda’s then cellmate, who he suspected could be used by the latter to take revenge on the entity. It was not the only query about these people. Also in November, two other of the agents now accused consulted data about them in the Argos databases (comprehensive system of inquiries for citizen security and border control), Sidenpol (which collects complaints in police stations and police intervention reports), Atlas (which includes police reviews and searches of people) and People-Objects (with information on people and objects classified as being of police interest). All these data appeared, after Villarejo’s arrest in 2017, in folders called ‘Búlgaro’ and ‘Bond’ that the commissioner had on his computer equipment.

The police inquiries have also located irregular inquiries from one of the police officers at the Adexttra and Atlas bases about two other citizens of foreign origin that were later included in the Neigbour Project reports. With this name, the commissioner baptized the investigation that he allegedly carried out for BBVA on the president of a Siberian oil and gas producer, Alexander N. Ch. Within this assignment, Villarejo collected information from 17 other people. In the car, the judge also asks the Police to expand the information collected so far on this espionage, since a consultation carried out on the same dates in four police bases of which the author has not yet been identified has been detected.

The imputed sub-inspector must answer for the query he made in the Argos, Atlas, Sidenpol and People-Object databases about five people who Villarejo spied on within what he baptized as the Templar Project. In this work, the commissioner investigated Eduardo SL, a 75-year-old investor who was engaged in the acquisition of properties with old-income tenants. According to the documentation included in the summary, BBVA allegedly commissioned Villarejo to verify the personal, professional, business, and “above all moral” solvency of the businessman. The commissioner investigated who his closest relatives and associates were, and highlighted in his reports that there were people with police records.

Finally, the judge will question a chief inspector for having consulted on November 27 and 28, 2014, the Addnifil database (which collects all the information from the DNI) on Luis RD, the main spy for Villarejo in the Hard Project. In this, the commissioner investigated the administrators of a company dedicated to real estate development and construction of buildings. The order highlights that the chief inspector charged with these events, and who is already retired, is already being investigated in other pieces of the Villarejo case accused of similar events.