The National Court has rejected the request of the former Security Director of Iberdrola Antonio Asenjo to order the dismissal of the crime of bribery in piece 17 of the so-called ‘Tandem case’, which investigates the company’s orders to former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo . In an order dated July 7 to which Efe has had access, the criminal court dismisses Asenjo’s request, who had requested the file on the understanding that his situation was identical to that of another former director, José Antonio del Olmo, on which the dismissal for bribery was agreed.
In its order, the Chamber considers that the conduct of one and the other in the facts investigated is not the same (in the case of Asenjo, the hiring of Villarejo and in that of Del Olmo, authorizing the payment of the invoices), therefore it does not The same archiving decision can be made. It will be at the end of the investigation, the magistrates maintain, when it is appropriate to assess the requested dismissal.
With this, the Chamber rejects Asenjo’s thesis that the order in which the investigating judge, Manuel García Castellón, discarded the file, lacked foundation; on the contrary, he describes his arguments as “impeccable”. During his statement before the judge, Asenjo explained that the electricity company “did not look for” Villarejo, but that it was the former commissioner who launched “a very aggressive commercial strategy” to offer his services to the company.
The magistrate is investigating whether Iberdrola hired the former commissioner for one million euros between 2004 and 2012 to, among other things, infiltrate platforms contrary to his interests or investigate a shareholder critical of his management. Last October, the criminal chamber of the National Court rejected an appeal from the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office and ratified the free dismissal for the president of Iberdrola, Ignacio Sánchez Galán, in the case.
