The start this Monday of the statement of retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo in the first major trial against him, in which he faces a request for 110 years in prison, did not disappoint.
The police officer used the questions posed by the Anticorruption Prosecutor's Office to try to muddy the case and take it to the terrain that he considers most beneficial to his interests: that of an alleged conspiracy against him about whose existence he has been talking for a long time in order to annul the evidence and, with it, the cause.
All this seasoned with veiled threats.
To do this, he made subtle allusions to former president Mariano Rajoy and king emeritus, Juan Carlos I, in addition to implicating, without evidence, also former president Felipe González in one of his works and accusing the National Intelligence Center (CNI) and its former director, General Félix Sanz Roldán, to the agents of the Internal Affairs Unit of the Police who carry out the investigations and to the Prosecutor's Office for falsifying “an arsenal of evidence” against him.
In between, references to the 11-M attacks, to the dirty war of the GAL and, on several occasions, to the so-called Operation Catalonia, launched by the Ministry of the Interior in the stage of Jorge Fernández Díaz to discredit the leaders of the Catalan independence movement.
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Villarejo points out that Fernández Díaz commissioned a report to give legal coverage to his companies
However, Villarejo's strategy collided with the firmness of the president of the court, Judge Angela Murillo - who reprimanded him twice - and the representative of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor, Miguel Serrano, who avoided entering into issues other than those that were discussed. they prosecute. Villarejo, faced with the failure of his maneuver, tried to show himself as a "servant" of the State that if he set up the companies with which he billed millions of euros to his private clients in exchange for information obtained in a supposedly fraudulent way, it was to cover his role of "intelligence agent" for "different" governments. "They entrusted me with very delicate questions relating to the interests of the State," he argued.
Villarejo's statement was produced during the oral hearing that, since last October, has been held at the National Court to prosecute three lines of investigation of the macro-summary of
the Tandem case
: the Iron, Land and Painter pieces. The first deals with the hiring of the commissioner by the firm Herrero & Asociados to allegedly spy on another law firm. Land focuses on the family war of the heirs of Luis García-Cereceda, the developer who built the luxury development La Finca in Pozuelo de Alarcón (Madrid). And Pintor investigates whether Juan Muñoz, husband of the presenter Ana Rosa Quintana, and his brother Fernando signed Villarejo to illegally obtain data from a former partner, to whom the latter claimed a debt. Next to the commissioner, 26 other people sit on the bench. Considering these minor with respect to other pieces in which the Operation Kitchen of espionage to the ex-treasurer of the PP Luis Bárcenas is investigated, or those that involve large companies such as BBVA or Iberdrola,the result of this trial will mark the future of the rest of the macrocause.
For this reason, from the beginning of the hearing, the commissioner has tried to torpedo it with various maneuvers, including the challenge of the court. The last time, last week, when he requested that magistrate Fermín Javier Echarri be removed, whom he accused of irregular intervention in a case in which Villarejo said he had participated. The court rejected this challenge "outright" on Monday.
After this setback, the commissioner used irony and his lack of memory on numerous occasions in order not to answer many of the questions that the prosecutor asked him about the most incriminating aspects of the work he did for his clients in the three pieces that are judged. Villarejo did admit that he collected information in exchange for significant amounts of money, but assured that he collected it from "open sources", in reference to public access databases or, simply, the internet, despite the fact that many of his reports contained only present data in confidential files of the police, Treasury or private entities.
The commissioner tried to justify this in an alleged manipulation of those reports. He wielded something similar about the audios in which he recorded his meetings with his clients: "They are manipulated recordings like practically all the instructions in the case," he said. And he even affirmed that these audios were made by the CNI during the "monitoring" to which it was subjected. To explain why they later appeared on his computer equipment, he claimed that the secret service provided them without knowing why.
Villarejo also presented himself as a victim of an alleged plot in which he implicated the Prosecutor's Office, which he accused of preventing him from accessing a copy of the agendas that were intervened by the policeman when he was arrested and in which he meticulously collected with who was speaking and about what: “I am at a disadvantage. I don't have what the prosecutor has, which are my personal diaries. Leave them to me and I'll answer you, ”he snapped. The policeman, who tried to exonerate his wife, Gema Alcalá, and his eldest son, both also on the bench, again denounced an alleged attempt to kill him while he was in prison, and again launched a veiled threat: “I'm going to tell everything what I know, everything I have done to avoid problems for the State ”. His statement, which is expected to be long, will continue this Tuesday and, predictably, will last all week.
Two defendants admit deals with the police to obtain data
On Monday, the court of the first major trial against retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo heard new testimonies from defendants who admit to having hired the police to allegedly illegally obtain sensitive information about third parties.
On this occasion it was the businessman Juan Muñoz Tamara, husband of the journalist Ana Rosa Quintana, and his brother Fernando.
Before the hearing, both had signed an agreement with the Anticorruption Prosecutor's Office in which they acknowledged the facts of which they are accused in exchange for reducing the initial request of eight years in prison to 11 months in prison.
In this Monday's statement, in addition to ratifying this acknowledgment of guilt, the two businessmen confirmed the veracity of the audios intervened at the commissioner - one of the main incriminating evidence against the policeman - which includes the meetings they held with him . After ensuring both that they never suspected that they were being recorded, they stressed that the sound files reflect the conversations they had with Villarejo, dismantling the argument of Villarejo's defense that they are manipulated.
Before the court, Juan Muñoz admitted to having met with Villarejo twice and to have given him 20,000 euros in cash for obtaining information about a partner of his brother with whom they had a dispute over a tax debt. As detailed, the commissioner was commissioned to obtain information on this businessman's assets that will dismantle the alleged false insolvency that he had alleged or "of any other kind." The order also included spying on the victim's lawyer, who was accused of having influenced his decision to disengage from the debt.
This compilation of information included two videos, one old and the other recent, in which this lawyer was seen using drugs and that Villarejo allegedly proposed to disseminate in order to extort him.
Muñoz insisted that ultimately they were not used against the victims.
The statement of his brother Fernando, in whose office the police intervened the Villarejo report along with a
pendrive
with the two videos, was coincidental.
In his statement this Monday, Villarejo accused both of lying in his pact with the Prosecutor's Office.