Villarejo: truths and lies of a recording addict

Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo Pérez was arrested on November 3, 2017 after a secret investigation initiated by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office a few months earlier.

The judicial search of their houses and companies uncovered a scandal that splashes several state institutions, the PP of Mariano Rajoy, the Ministry of the Interior, King Juan Carlos I, the National Intelligence Center, half a dozen commissioners, journalists and to some of the main Ibex 35 companies.

The police found in the search large amounts of cash —the product of an inheritance and mistrust of banks, according to the commissioner's version—, watches and luxury bags, several gold bars, two dozen hard drives containing They stored recordings of conversations with journalists, politicians and businessmen, agendas where he noted his appointments and wrote reflections on his contacts, contracts of his private companies with numerous clients, and intelligence reports based on illegal espionage. All this material gathered hundreds of pieces of evidence of the crimes allegedly committed by the commissioner during more than 20 years of professional activity: criminal organization, bribery, revelation of secrets, money laundering...

Judge Manuel García Castellón, who initiated the case for Villarejo's businesses with a businessman linked to Equatorial Guinea, opened up to 30 different pieces in four years of investigation for the activities of the commissioner, who retired in 2016.

Villarejo has now begun to defend himself in the first of the trials that await him.

The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office accuses him as the head of a business network dedicated to spying on and extorting money from his clients' adversaries in exchange for large amounts of money.

The retired commissioner has taken advantage of the occasion to slip serious insinuations from the bench about various State institutions, fundamentally the CNI, and has tried to tarnish the image of relevant personalities, involving them directly or indirectly in his criminal activities for private clients.

His confessions as the main defendant in this trial, with the right to lie to defend himself, have conveyed the idea that Commissioner Villarejo's adventures are based on a great fallacy.

EL PAÍS has analyzed the evidence accumulated in different summaries during the four years of judicial investigation to try to determine which part of Villarejo's story is false and which part is authentic.

Extortion as a political weapon.

First target: Ignacio González

In March 2015, Villarejo provided several media outlets with a part of the recorded conversation with Ignacio González, then Vice President of the Community of Madrid, during a meeting held on November 29, 2011 in a cafeteria near Puerta del Sol.

The commissioner maintains that this meeting was a police mission entrusted by his boss, the then deputy director of operations, now deceased.

However, another commissioner, his former friend Enrique García Castaño, assures that the meeting was organized by him to do Ignacio González a favor.

The politician asked Villarejo for help in that appointment to bury the controversy over an attic in Estepona that he had rented.

The police investigated whether the property was actually the payment to González of an illegal commission for a corrupt adjudication.

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Villarejo assures that he did "a favor" to Ana Rosa Quintana

José Manuel Villarejo, on January 12 at the National Court in San Fernando de Henares.Photo: EDUARDO PARRA (EUROPA PRESS) |

Video: EPV

The publication of that recording, more than three years after the meeting, gave Ignacio González the political edge.

Mariano Rajoy's PP erased him as a candidate in the regional elections that were held two months later.

A court indicted González and his wife for the suspicions about the attic.

Only a few months ago the case was filed for lack of evidence.

Villarejo bragged about that management with his friends: “I called them [the PP leaders] and told them: 'Hey, I'm trying to stop the recording but I don't know if it's going to be possible.'

And they tell me to continue, because he is very pissed off.

He gets hit with the stomp."

In Villarejo's personal agendas, the commissioner pointed out several times between 2012 and 2015 the PP's interest in discrediting Ignacio González.

Tips on the PP to avoid damage in the 'Gürtel case'

Villarejo's recordings of the former general secretary of the PP, Dolores de Cospedal, and her husband, businessman Ignacio López del Hierro, reveal the information that the commissioner provided on secret police investigations. Among them, those referring to the

with tips so that the PP leaders involved in them could destroy evidence before various searches were carried out. "I spoke with Cotino a few days ago," he tells Cospedal's husband in one of his conversations on September 9, 2009. "I told him to tell his nephew to clean up the papers and to be careful with an award because they were to the parrot And I told him that there was an investigation open to the president of the Provincial Council of Alicante and Zaplana entered a lot ”. A few months after that conversation, the police arrested the president of the Alicante Provincial Council as part of Operation Brugal.

Although Villarejo was never part of the investigations of

his closeness to the head of the police unit in charge of the case made him aware of many aspects of the case.

The CNI as a scapegoat to justify the recordings

José Manuel Villarejo maintains that the recordings that incriminate him in multiple crimes and that have triggered the accusation of businessmen, policemen, journalists and politicians, were executed by the CNI. "They had me monitored although they gave me the recordings for my safety," he declared at trial. The recordings - many of telephone conversations, others made in restaurants, offices or even inside cars - could only be made directly by him. The evidence collected during the judicial investigation does not point to the CNI in any case. Villarejo explained it this way to EL PAÍS: “The vast majority of the recordings are not mine, they are from the CNI. In 2001 I began to maintain relations with Arab countries when the CNI decided that it was better to keep me monitored 24 hours a day,which I accepted because I thought they would never be so crazy…”.

And yet, in the same interview with EL PAÍS he declared: "I have recorded on occasions (...)".

And he explained that he kept all this material in his house with a purpose: “It was my personal archive, I thought that when I was 80 years old I would quietly write some memoirs, write what the history of Spain really was and in any case I had already spoken to a series of people to start writing my memoirs after retirement as long as they were not published before 2040 at the earliest”.

February 2017, eight months before his arrest.

"If they register me, I have Corinna's affidavit ready for them"

The retired police officer spoke eight months before his arrest with a journalist: "At any moment," Villarejo said, "they will look for a judge to justify a search of my house. Let's see what they find. Man, two or three things so that they find them and they don't have to look for them, I have them prepared, right? Uh, so that… also, I'll tell the [judicial] clerk, make a note, make a note that they take this, uh, a sworn statement from a lady named Corinna, I don't know what this says, here it is. Take note that they take this, eh? And don't worry about it getting ripped because I have plenty of copies."

In that recorded talk, the policeman summarized his strategy in the face of the judicial harassment that he was beginning to suffer and in the face of a possible arrest, which would take place months later. If someone threatened him, Villarejo would uncover sensitive information that endangered high state institutions. That maneuver, he thought, would be his main armor and would make him untouchable.

At least, that is what his colleague Enrique García Castaño, a police commissioner like him, told a journalist from the

newspaper a year earlier . “So, next step, this whole thing with Corinna's accounts; an account in Turkey, an account in Switzerland, commissions, payments, bills, pictures, I don't know what… I don't know how many. Cerdán [journalist from

has everything

. And the moment Villarejo goes crazy or sees that the paranoia of "they're going for me" enters him, boom! (…) And that's the play”.

Seven months after Villarejo entered prison,

and

published part of the recording of one of the meetings between the police commissioner and Corinna Larsen, where the ex-lover of Juan Carlos I details the opaque business of the king and his fortune hidden in Switzerland.

Those secrets uncovered by Villarejo after recording Corinna concluded with several investigations in Spain and Switzerland that proved the existence of a multimillion-dollar fortune that the emeritus hid in Switzerland and that he never declared to the Spanish treasury. As Villarejo was in jail when that conversation was published, the commissioner accused the anti-corruption prosecutors who were handling the case of the leak: "There are 20 subjects in the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office who are open-minded and radical and they are the ones who leak Corinna's theme. There is not a single piece of evidence in the summary that proves this circumstance, and yet there are multiple indications that Villarejo had the intention, acknowledged by himself, of making that information public if he found himself in difficulty.

False insinuations about the Barcelona attacks

Villarejo maintains a particular war against the former director of the CNI, Félix Sanz Roldan, whom he accuses of all the evils that threaten him.

Without coming to account or being related to the facts attributed to him, the retired commissioner slipped in the trial the idea that the Spanish intelligence service had controlled one of the alleged masterminds of the Barcelona attacks and, despite this , I let him continue with the preparations for the massacre to destabilize the Catalan government, fully involved in the independence challenge.

"In the end it was a serious mistake by Mr. Sánz Roldán, who miscalculated the consequences for giving Catalonia a little scare," said the commissioner.

When those events occurred, Villarejo was already a retired policeman, he did not participate in the investigation of the attack and, therefore, he never had direct information to insinuate something so serious.

But the Catalan government took advantage of the insinuation of the commissioner to demand an urgent investigation of the events, leaving in the air the idea that the Spanish government allowed the attack on Las Ramblas.

The Catalan Parliament has already investigated those events and the alleged conspiracy theory, according to which the CNI had controlled the terrorist who masterminded the attacks and did nothing to prevent the tragedy.

The proven facts say that the imam of Ripoll, Abdelbaki Es Satty, had spent four years in prison (2010-2014) for drug trafficking and the CNI met with him a few months before he was released. Three years after leaving prison, the attacks in Barcelona and Cambrils were committed, killing 16 people. Es Satty, considered the mastermind of those attacks, died a day before the massacre in the explosion of Alcanar's house, where the terrorist command was hiding to prepare the attack.

The conspiracy thesis indicated that the Police made Es Satty's file disappear so that no one would know that he had been an informer of this security body.

But the premise was false: those chips were never destroyed.

It was also suggested that the CNI tapped the terrorists' phones five days before the attacks, when in fact what was done was to track all the command's calls in the five days following the attack.

Leaks from jail to entangle in the process

Villarejo repeatedly accused the Prosecutor's Office and the CNI of leaking the material that was seized from his homes and companies during the searches.

However, the judicial investigation (piece number 28 of

has proven otherwise.

Villarejo continued to control from the Estremera prison a “massive documentation” that he offered to journalists, politicians and lawyers through other prisoners who were on leave.

Part of this documentation was included in the open summary at the National High Court, but another part (including some recordings) were not accessible to those involved in the case.

The files that Villarejo put into circulation through other prisoners were related to Operation Catalonia —police efforts against the independence movement—, with the former treasurer of the PP, Luis Bárcenas;

or with the ex-lover of the king, Corinna Larsen, among others.