First conviction of ex-commissioner José Manuel Villarejo. After years of legal proceedings in which he has emerged unsuccessful, this representative of the State’s sewers must accept a sentence of 19 years in prison handed down by the National Court. This sentence, for the pieces Land, Iron and Pintor, was key because it is the first trial held against him for the so-called Operation Tandem, a macro-cause for the private businesses of a former high-ranking police officer. After this ruling, many others will come because the ex-commissioner has dozens of cases pending for his outrages for years, including Operation Kitchen, for the use of reserved funds to steal documentation on box b from PP treasurer Luis Bárcenas.
Despite the fact that the sentence is almost two decades in prison, it is far from the more than 80 years that the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor requested. The court has sentenced him for the crimes of revealing secrets and falsifying a commercial document but has acquitted him for bribery and extortion. The withdrawal of bribery is key to the rest of the cases because according to this sentence Villarejo sold his private business, through the Cenyt company, not the police company, therefore despite being a public official he did not act as such. “The activity carried out by the defendant, in no case had the purpose of undermining the legitimacy and the criteria of action of the Public Administration, but to obtain greater private benefits by offering a series of services that are difficult to achieve, at least through legal channels”, the sentence states.
The resolution, of 351 pages, considers that it cannot be convicted of bribery since the requirements of this criminal type do not meet given that the acts carried out by Villarejo “did not carry out in the exercise of his position nor were they related to his public activities”.
In the event that the sentence is appealed, it will be the Appeals Chamber of the National Court and ultimately the Supreme Court that will determine if this argument about bribery is valid. Both the convicted and the Prosecutor’s Office can appeal the sentence and meanwhile the Chamber, at the request of one of the parties, must study whether a visit is held for the ex-commissioner to enter preventive detention while there is a final sentence. Villarejo already spent more than three years in pretrial detention after his arrest in November 2017.
The magistrates of the Fourth Section of the Criminal Chamber have handed down a sentence in the first three pieces that have been tried in the so-called Tandem case, in which the hiring of the Villarejo company, Cenyt, has been investigated to carry out certain assignments.
In total, 26 people have been tried, in addition to Villarejo, including his partner Rafael Redondo, who has been sentenced to 13 years in prison for the same crimes as the former commissioner. Nine other people have been sentenced to between three months and two years in prison, while 16 have been acquitted, including Villarejo’s wife, Gema Alcalá, and their son, José Manuel Villarejo Gil, as well as police officers Constancio Riaño and Antonio Bonilla. In the case of Enrique García Castaño, he was excluded from the trial due to illness.
What the Chamber argues to free Villarejo from passive bribery is that the acts carried out by this defendant were not carried out in the exercise of his position, nor were they related to his public activities.
There is no record of any payment by clients to public officials, for obtaining data, what is more, there was no relationship or connection between them, Villarejo being the only link”.
The court explains that Villarejo’s clients, the firm Herrero y Asociados or Susana García Cereceda -owner of the Farm-, did so because of their status as owner of the Cenyt company, in charge of making confidential reports, with detective services and lawyers.
“His services were required 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 investigation, adding that it maintained close institutional and operational relations with the State Security Corps and Forces and with the Justice Administration, which allowed it to achieve large doses of efficiency.”
The court also rejects that the facts fit into active bribery since the individuals who hired Villarejo’s services did not seek to cause harm to the Administration for their own benefit “but to achieve private and spurious interests.
In the case of the piece Iron, it consisted of harming a competing company made up, among others, of various people who were previously part of Herrero y Asociados S.L. In relation to García Cereceda, what was sought was to seek information on the tendencies and intentions of several people related to the family in order to position themselves before future claims related to the inheritance of the deceased businessman Luis García Cereceda, mainly between his daughter, the defendant Susana García Cereceda and the company Procisa, and the former’s widow Silvia Gómez Cuétara, also affecting other people around the latter.”
The sentence rules out the crime of bribery but points out that the facts analyzed and the accredited deception could have fit into other criminal types that have not been charged to the defendants and therefore cannot be convicted of fraud.
“The superlative degree of deception perpetrated against his unsuspecting clients, -despite the professional qualification that can be assumed for them- and the displacement of assets as a result of such a fallacy would place Villarejo’s actions within the orbit of crimes of a fraudulent nature of which he has not been accused”, he concludes.
The sentence includes a particular opinion of the magistrate Carmen Paloma González who disagrees with the sentence for understanding that José Manuel Villarejo is the author of two crimes of passive bribery for the hiring of his company Cenyt in the Iron and Land pieces, as well as several of the defendants in these pieces as necessary cooperators of this crime.
This magistrate considers that to carry out the activities carried out by Cenyt it was absolutely essential to have the collaboration of the police establishment.
The acts committed by Villarejo and by the people he used, according to this judge, “are contrary to the duties inherent to his position, and more specifically, to crimes, thus frontally attacking the prestige and effectiveness of the public function, the impartiality of its officials and the effectiveness of the public service entrusted to them.”
As a consequence of the foregoing, the dissenting opinion adds, “it is inferred that it is impossible to reconcile 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 he carried out illegal (criminal) activities.” Pintor Piece
Regarding the piece that splashed the husband of the television presenter Ana Rosa Quintana, the Chamber has acquitted Villarejo of the alleged extortion committed as a commission from the businessman Muñoz -one of them Quintana’s husband- against the lawyer of a former partner of both.
The Chamber explains that not a single one of the accusations, neither the public nor the private ones, “pronounced any sentence in order to prove the existence of specific facts constituting a crime and the participation in it of the persons accused of that criminal offence”.
The lack of evidence, he points out, is absolute, constituting a paradigm in the case of José Manuel Villarejo Gil, son of the former commissioner, whose only accredited activity is having been present at a meeting at the headquarters of the Cenyt company.
The court points out that there is no reference at any time to specific violent or intimidating acts carried out against the people of Mateo Martín Navarro or Francisco Javier Urquía tending to make them carry out or omit any act or legal transaction to their detriment.
In this piece, the only two sentenced to 3 months in prison for the crime of discovery are the brothers Juan and Fernando Muñoz Tamara who on October 1, 2020, in the presence of their lawyers, signed a document with the Public Prosecutor acknowledging the facts, which was ratified at trial. In addition, both consigned the amount of 10,000 euros to face the civil responsibilities that could result in a sentence.
One of the two victims of these events, the lawyer and former judge Francisco Javier Urquía, granted an express pardon to all the defendants, while the other injured party, the former partner of the Muñoz Mateo Martín Navarro, waived civil and criminal actions against all the defendants except for Villarejo and Redondo, the Muñoz Tamara brothers and other defendants.
