Former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo has been sentenced to 19 years in prison for various crimes of revealing secrets, both of a company in the Iron room and of individuals in the Land room. The National Court has also attributed crimes of falsification of commercial documentation to the former police.
In this first sentence in the Tándem case, Villarejo has been acquitted of bribery in Iron and Land, as well as extortion in the degree of conspiracy in Pintor, the third piece that has been tried during this process in the Fourth Section of the Criminal Chamber of the National Court. The trial has concluded with a sentence significantly lower than the 83 years initially requested by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor.
This case examines the actions of Cenyt, a company linked to the commissioner, and some orders that this entity carried out under contract with third parties while it was still a police officer. A total of 26 people have been tried, including Rafael Redondo, a Villarejo partner who has been sentenced to 13 years in prison for the same crimes as his partner.
Nine convicted and sixteen acquitted
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, the trial due to illness was excluded.
The sentence, of 351 pages, considers that it cannot be convicted of bribery since the requirements of this criminal type are not met given that the acts carried out by Villarejo “were not carried out in the exercise of his charge nor were they related to his public activities” and were carried out in an “absolutely private sphere”.
He was hired as the owner of Cenyt
In this context, the magistrates explain that “there is no record of any payment by the clients of public officials for obtaining data.” “What’s more, there was no relationship or connection between those and these, Villarejo being the only link,” they add.
The sentence argues that both in ‘Iron’ and in ‘Pintor’ Villarejo was hired in his capacity as the CENYT company, a “large multidisciplinary network that advertised itself on social networks as an intelligence unit dedicated to economic and financial, investigating that it will strengthen institutional and operational relations with business bodies and State Security Forces and with the Administration of Justice, which allowed it to achieve large doses of efficiency.”
The court rejects that the facts fit into active bribery since the individuals who contracted the services of Villarejo did not seek to cause harm to the Administration for their own benefit “but to achieve private and spurious interests that contrast with harming a competing company or to gain knowledge about the trends and intentions of various people related to the García Cereceda family.”
“With the collaboration of the police state”
All in all, Judge Carmen Paloma González has issued a dissenting opinion, understanding that Villarejo should have been convicted of two crimes of passive bribery, while other defendants should have been considered necessary collaborators.
Specifically, the magistrate details that in order to carry out the activities carried out by CENYT it was “absolutely essential to have the collaboration of the police establishment.” In his opinion, the acts committed by Villarejo “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”.
In this line, González maintains that “the impossibility of reconciling 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” is inferred.
The alternative to bribery
Despite the fact that the Chamber rules out the crime of bribery, it points out that the facts analyzed and the accredited deception could have fit into other criminal types that were not charged to any of the defendants.
“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 fraudulent crimes of which he has not been accused, “he concludes.
It should be remembered that these were the first pieces of ‘Tandem’ that reached a trial of the almost 50 that make up a macro-case structured by the alleged use that Villarejo would have made of the police means at their disposal to use them in private investigations towards their clients, from large IBEX 35 companies to individuals.
seven years for iron
Specifically, ‘Iron’ investigated the alleged commission that the law firm specializing in intellectual property Herrero&Asociados would have made to the Villarejo business group, CENYT, to investigate another law firm, Balder, given the suspicion by the first law firm that the second had stolen its database.
The court imposes 4 years in prison on Villarejo for the crime of revealing company secrets for obtaining certain tax data from Balder. In addition, it sentences him to 3 years for a crime of continued falsification of a commercial document in relation to five invoices for non-existent benefits that served the Herrero office to cover exaggerated remuneration far from the real market prices with which the provision of illegal services is intended.
Twelve years for Land
In ‘Land’, the investigation was investigated that the commissioner would have directed against Yolanda García Cereceda, her then partner Jaime Ostos son and the architect Joaquín Torres, among others, by order of Susana García Cereceda due to the family and business conflict unleashed after the death of Luis García Cereceda, who was the owner of the company promoting the luxury development ‘La Finca’ (Madrid).
In relation to this, the Chamber sentences Villarejo to 9 years in prison as the author of three crimes of revealing private secrets with dissemination to third parties for obtaining positioning data and call traffic, between July and August 2013, of Silvia Gómez-Cuétara, widow of the owner of Procisa, and of an acquaintance of Procisa and of an employee. In addition, the court also imposes 3 years in prison on the now retired commissioner for falsifying a commercial document.
There is no extortion in Pintor
Finally, in ‘Pintor’, the work carried out by Villarejo commissioned by the brothers Juan and Fernando Muñoz Támara was investigated to investigate the businessman Mateo Martín Navarro and his lawyer, former judge Francisco Javier Urquía, to resolve the dispute over a tax debt.
In relation to the crime of extortion in the degree of conspiracy on which this piece revolved, the Chamber explains that not a single one of the suspicions, neither public nor private, “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 this criminal offense”.
The lack of proof, the magistrates point out, is absolute, constituting a paradigm in the case of José Manuel Villarejo Gil, son of the commissioner, whose only accredited activity is having attended a meeting at the headquarters of the CENYT company, his father’s business ship.
In this piece, the only two sentenced – to 3 months in prison for the crime of discovery – have been the brothers Juan and Fernando Muñoz Tamara, who signed a document with the Public Prosecutor’s Office acknowledging the facts that was ratified in the trial.
