The National Court acquits Villarejo despite considering another espionage project proven | Spain

by Andrea
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The retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo, who has accumulated , avoids a new prison sentence. The National Court has acquitted the former Police agent of three other crimes attributed to him by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office for executing the so-called Saving Project, an espionage commission financed in 2011 by the deceased businessman José Moya, former president of the Persan company.

The court considers it proven that Moya paid half a million euros to Villarejo so that, together with his partner and lawyer Rafael Redondo, he could collect information to resolve the conflict he had with the real estate company Martinsa Fadesa. The magistrates even consider it proven that the plot was carried out with the traffic of calls from several victims. But, however, the National Court exonerated the commissioner by concluding that his actions had no relationship with his position as an official and that it has not been proven that he used it to obtain confidential data.

In its ruling, 124 pages long and dated this Tuesday, the court rules out the crimes of bribery, document falsification and discovery and disclosure of secrets. For all of them, the Prosecutor’s Office requested another sentence of 23 and a half years in prison for Villarejo; and 19 years old for Redondo.

To rule out the crime of bribery, the magistrates state that Villarejo’s actions only sought to obtain “some lucrative private interests, through the conduct of a private investigation”, unrelated to his position as commissioner. According to them, this assignment is not related to the public functions of the agent, nor did it cause “impairment” to the Administration: “All payments responded to the provision of private services.” […] “We are facing an absolutely private action,” reads the ruling, signed by judges Juan Francisco Martel, Javier Mariano Ballesteros and Francisco Segura.

For its part, to reject imposing a sentence for crimes of discovery and disclosure of secrets, the resolution argues that it has not been proven, “with the rigor required by the criminal process,” that Villarejo used his position to access the call traffic of the people they were investigating. “It has not been proven how said call traffic was accessed. It cannot be presumed, against the inmate, that the accused commissioner, due to his status as a senior police officer, took advantage of his specific public function for this purpose,” the opinion of the National Court adds, adding that it has not been demonstrated that these sensitive data were transferred to third parties.

Regarding the crime of falsifying a commercial document for the invoices issued for the work carried out by Villarejo, the court considers that, although the concepts were altered “for reasons of confidentiality or confidentiality”, these are due to “private services actually provided.”

The ruling explains that José Moya hired Villarejo to investigate possible irregularities in the bankruptcy procedure of Martinsa Fadesa, “whose knowledge he could use in an eventual negotiation with Fernando Martín to recover the investment he had made. [en 2007] through the purchase of company shares” worth 100 million euros.

He Villarejo case, constitutes a convoluted skein with dozens of lines of research. The National Court has already held five trials against the retired commissioner. The first (focused on espionage projects for companies and individuals named Iron, Land and Pintor) resulted in an initial sentence of 19 years in prison for the police officer. The court has also sentenced him to three years and one day in prison for an assignment by Grupo Planeta to spy on one of the arbitrators of the award he had opened with Kiss FM; and others with the aim of acting against Luis del Rivero, then president of Sacyr, who sought to take control of the oil company in 2011. The fourth trial dealt with Project Saving; and the fifth, whose sentence is still pending, dealt with another assignment that Villarejo received in 2015 from an individual, Marzena Katarzina, to spy on a businessman from Marbella, Felipe GZ, with whom he had a financial conflict.

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