This Tuesday, the Appeals Chamber of the National Court annulled the first sentence of the Villarejo case, which sentenced retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo to 19 years in prison for not evaluating all the evidence presented at the oral hearing. The court does not force the trial to be repeated – which lasted for a year (from October 2021 to September 2022) – but orders the magistrates who tried him to write a new ruling in which they rule on all the evidence that was put forward. on the table and “on all the crimes subject to accusation.” Villarejo, who this week was sentenced to three years in prison for another line of investigation, is currently free.
He Villarejo case thus experiencing a revolution of enormous dimensions. Last July, the Fourth Section of the Criminal Chamber issued the first sentence of this macro summary and marked the path to follow in all the parts that remain to be judged. However, that ruling has now received a major setback from the Appeals Chamber, which upholds several appeals presented (including that of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office) and forces the court of first instance to redo its conclusions. “The report of proven facts of the sentence is not admitted,” emphasizes the resolution known this Tuesday.
The first conviction of Villarejo addressed three espionage projects: those named Iron, Land and Pintor. Iron focuses on the commissioner’s hiring by the Herrero & Asociados law firm to spy on a rival firm. Land refers to the family war of the heirs of Luis García-Cereceda, the developer who built the luxury development La Finca, in Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid). And Pintor deals with how the businessman Juan Muñoz Tamara, husband of the presenter Ana Rosa Quintana, allegedly signed Villarejo to illegally obtain data from a former partner from whom he claimed a debt. The clients of all these orders admitted that they obtained the services of the police officer.
In this first trial of the case, in addition to Villarejo, 26 other people sat in the dock. Among them, his partner Rafael Redondo, who was also sentenced (to 13 years in prison). Nine other people were sentenced to prison: all of them clients of the commissioner. For their part, 15 defendants were acquitted—including the woman, Gemma Alcalá, and the son of the former police officer. The trial was suspended in the middle of the hearing against Commissioner Enrique García Castaño, alias Fatbecause he suffered a stroke.
The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office appealed the first instance ruling, considering it “insufficient.” The public prosecution maintains that the conclusions of that sentence favorable to Villarejo “depart from the maxims of logic and experience in the evaluation of the evidence”: “Any evaluation of relevant evidence carried out in the plenary session on the nature of the evidence has been omitted. of the activity carried out by the accused.”
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And the Appeals Chamber now expresses itself along the same lines, ordering the Fourth Section to rule on a whole battery of issues that they ignored in their resolution. Among others, as reported by the National Court this Tuesday, “it must carry out an evaluation of the evidence carried out in the trial and for which there is no motivation whatsoever”, as well as on “the crimes of conspiracy to extort, obstruction of “Justice and the lack of motivation for the compensation established as civil liability.”
The bribery debate
In July, by two votes to one, the majority of the court’s magistrates convicted Villarejo for revealing secrets and falsifying documents, but acquitted him of bribery – one of the main keys to the case – and extortion. The Prosecutor’s Office focused part of its appeal on that acquittal for bribery, but the Appeals Chamber does not consider this issue. Having agreed to annul the sentence, it will again be the three first instance magistrates (Ángela Murillo and Fermín Echarri, who ruled out that crime; and Carmen Paloma González, who did see it) who will have to debate again and rule on the issue. in the second resolution that they have to issue now.
In justifying the acquittal for bribery, magistrates Ángela Murillo and Fermín Echarri argued that Villarejo carried out his illegal activities within his “private sphere” – through the Cenyt business group, which he used for his scams – and not “in the exercise of his position” of commissioner. The third judge, Carmen Paloma González, rejected this thesis and issued a dissenting opinion, considering it “impossible” to “make compatible the mission legally attributed to a public official of preventing the commission of crimes with the performance of a private activity for the achievement of which carried out criminal activities.” For its part, the Appeals Chamber does not enter into the specific debate of this case, but it does recall the jurisprudence of the Supreme Court on this crime, “whose protected legal asset is correct impartiality in the exercise of public function, guaranteeing probity and impartiality of its officials.”
Therefore, the debate on bribery remains completely open. And this week another element to take into account has been introduced. The National Court this Monday sentenced the retired commissioner to three years in prison for bribery in another of the pending trials of the summary: for having carried out an order from Grupo Planeta at the beginning of 2014 to spy on one of the arbitrators of the award that he had open. with Kiss FM. This decision, which contradicts the acquittal for bribery in the first trial, concludes that Villarejo deviated from his police function when he accepted the assignment of the communication group as a businessman.
The order of Grupo Planeta
The National Court has not only condemned Villarejo for the Planeta assignment, but also the police officer Antonio Giménez Raso. However, the sentence absolves the head of Security of the communication group and the director of Legal Services, Antonio López López and Luis Elías Viñeta, respectively, considering that both were unaware of Villarejo’s active police status when they hired him to prepare the so-called July Report.
The proven facts of the sentence explain that Villarejo and Giménez Raso, through their company Cenyt, met with the two accused of the Planeta Group with the task of investigating whether, who had been one of the arbitrators appointed by the Chamber of Commerce of Madrid, Julio González Soria, in the arbitration procedure with Kiss FM could have received bribes on account of such intervention.
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