Malaga, (EFE) has no connection with the origin of the procedure.
Valadez, who has testified as a witness in the Provincial Court of Malaga, has regretted that some defense counsel for different defendants have tried to point out some link between Villarejo and the Astapa case and has stressed that they have done so “to divert attention”.
The defenses assured in the phase of previous questions that Villarejo had manipulated the instruction of the procedure because he had real estate interests in said municipality and that, therefore, the fundamental rights of the accused had been violated.
David Valadez was proclaimed mayor in July 2008 after the Astapa case broke out and Antonio Barrientos was imprisoned, and he has recounted that at that time he did not know the commissioner, that it was much later when a parish priest from a church in Estepona told him who had a policeman brother.
Complaint in Madrid
“I met Villarejo to have a coffee when he was already mayor, as I did with many other people, but I insist, when I was already mayor,” Valadez reiterated.
“There was no interference, Villarejo’s interference in the Astapa case, I did not know about it. In addition, Cristina Rodríguez and I filed the complaint on November 16, 2006 in Madrid, before the Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit (UDEF) of the National Police Force ”, he added.
Asked by the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor about the reason he filed the complaint in Madrid instead of Estepona, he assured that they did it there because they were “fed up with denouncing it at all levels of our party without the slightest attention being paid to us.”
He has recounted that he held innumerable meetings to denounce the hiring policy that was carried out in the City Council and that his partner and he “verified for four years that all activities related to sports associations, social groups, brotherhoods and neighborhood associations were financed with money from of urban planning that was paid in cash outside the supervision of the city council”.
“No economic amount passed through the filters that exist in a municipal corporation,” he warned, “there was no control by the auditor or by the treasurer, we verified how municipal elections arrive and that is a fair, without knowing what is the source of funding?
insults and reproaches
Faced with this situation, Rodríguez and Valadez chose to go to the Spanish capital because “it was obvious that if we went to the investigating court or the National Police Commissioner immediately, the existence of this complaint would be leaked and any investigation would be aborted,” he stated.
“I have never received advice, pressure and influence from anyone, I was the one who contacted the police to inform them of the events that were occurring”, and has reiterated that “Villarejo and I did not maneuver a plot in 2006 so that I ended up as mayor”.
He has reported that both his party partner and he valued reporting the facts: “we valued our lives and we knew that there would be harm to us as there was, but we chose to report them,” he stressed, while acknowledging that to this day perhaps I would not have denounced.
At one point in his speech, Valadez asked the Court that “please” the defendant, former mayor Antonio Barrientos, not insult him because he was calling him a “liar and liar.” EFE