The Court orders the police to examine the internal investigation carried out by BBVA into the orders to Villarejo

The façade of the BBVA corporate headquarters, in an archive image Luis Sevillano

The confidence of the judge of the National Court, Manuel García-Castellón, in the internal investigation of BBVA on his participation in the Villarejo case was already questioned last June, when the person who led it, Javier López Andreo, declared.

The magistrate questioned the work of the executive of the firm PwC, as well as the collaboration of BBVA, and demanded that he send more documents under penalty of charging him.

This Wednesday he has taken a further step by agreeing “to make available to the Internal Affairs Unit (IAU) of the National Police that undertakes the investigation of this procedure the

(documents) obtained by PwC by applying the keywords (2,3 million). "Of these keywords, only 10% were investigated, after the selection made by the Garrigues law firm, which leads the defense of BBVA in this case. Among the excluded documents and words is that of the bank's president, Carlos Torres as well as those of others who were involved in Sacyr's attempted assault on BBVA in 2004, such as Carlos Arenillas, Jaime Caruana, Joaquín Almunia, Manuel Pizarro and Juan Abelló, and who were investigated by Villarejo.

García-Castellón orders that “this information be placed in the place designated for this purpose in order to carry out the diligence.

On the part of the Internal Affairs Unit, a new search will be carried out, circumscribing the keywords (

) to the names of the assignments entrusted to Mr. Villarejo and the main investigated in said projects, in accordance with the documentation seized in his possession " .

The judge focuses on the Security department

After the investigations, "the result will be made available to the Court, and the

be returned

to the bank."

With this step, the judge wants to prevent the police inquiries from being sent to the parties and the confidentiality of some BBVA documents may be violated, as the entity has claimed.

In the car, the judge takes another step of relevance.

It requires BBVA "to clearly and in detail identify the complete organization chart of the Corporate Security department from 2004 to the present, as well as all the personnel assigned to that department between 2004 to the present, also identifying their corporate email ”.

The Hearing focuses on this department as a possible link between the retired commissioner, José Manuel Villarejo, with the bank, since Julio Corrochano, BBVA's head of Security, was a hierarchical superior of the police officer for years.

All this investigation is within part 9 of the

, which investigates the financial entity as a legal entity for the alleged crimes of bribery, discovery and disclosure of secrets and corruption in business due to the contracts it signed with Cenyt -the company controlled by Villarejo- when he was active in the Police and reported an income of 10.2 million euros.

The judge seeks "efficiency and speed" in the search

Throughout the car, the magistrate points out that reviewing the 2.3 million keywords would not be practical and could block the investigation.

For this reason, in order to seek “greater efficiency and speed

will be the judge who indicates what the police should look for, “defining the criteria”.

He admits that he will follow the requests of Luis Pineda, president of Ausbanc, who has repeatedly requested a new analysis of the documents found by BBVA.

Specifically, "the names of the assignments entrusted to Mr. Villarejo and the main investigated in said projects, according to the seized documentation" will be analyzed.

"Once the search is carried out, the result will be made available to the Court, and the hits will be returned to the bank," he concludes.

The Prosecutor's Office, in its brief, is very critical of BBVA's attitude in the process.

He complains that the court only has the documents “selected by BBVA's lawyers.

Therefore, it cannot be shared that their performance is transparent, ”he says.

It also indicates that the bank “does not contribute the hundreds of thousands of

that have been considered relevant for the investigation and that are classified from highest to lowest relevance in reds, oranges and yellows according to the heat map provided from among the millions of hits found. .

But it does so without sufficiently explaining, in addition, why it considers them relevant ", since it has been qualifying as" not relevant "many documents and information expressly requested by the Instructor and by the Prosecutor's Office".

Finally, Anti-Corruption complains that "the parties cannot direct the work of PwC due to what has already been stated, nor can the Court appoint said consultant as a judicial expert in this procedure for elementary reasons of conflict of interest."