Madrid (EFE).- The sentence to 19 years in prison for ex-commissioner José Manuel Villarejo responds to the first of the multiple judicial fronts that he accumulates in the National Court, although the acquittal for bribery opens a mystery about the future of other pieces of the Tandem case in which orders from companies and individuals to his company, Cenyt, are investigated.
The court has acquitted him of the crimes of passive and active bribery that were attributed to Villarejo and other defendants (also policemen) in the Iron and Land pieces because, despite his status as a public official, he acted in the private and non-public sphere.
This is the first sentence in the Tándem case and the first conviction of Villarejo – who was acquitted in two other cases opened in other courts for insults to the former head of the CNI Félix Sanz Roldán and for the recording and broadcasting in 2014 of a meeting between CNI agents and police about Francisco Nicolás Gómez Iglesias, Little Nicolás.
In 2017, Villarejo was arrested in the Tandem operation and was in pretrial detention for almost three years. At that time, the judge was opening pieces to him as the Internal Affairs unit and the Prosecutor’s Office were reeling off the enormous documentation found in his house, which exposed his business at the head of Cenyt and also the hidden accounts of King Juan Carlos I by the hand of a conversation with Corina Larssen that he had recorded.
To this day, the Tándem case accumulates almost fifty lines of investigation for as many projects, the last ones recently opened at the request of Internal Affairs, a unit against which the former commissioner has charged time and again for leading a cause that he considers “prepared” to destroy him.
These are some of the pieces of the extensive Tandem puzzle:
Kitchen
One of the ones that caused the most commotion since it came to light, in November 2018, when the judge and prosecutors discovered the existence of an alleged parapolice espionage operation on Luis Bárcenas and his family that would have been concocted by the Ministry of the Interior in 2013 to obtain compromising documents from the Gürtel case for the PP.
Jorge Fernández Díaz, Minister of the Interior with Mariano Rajoy in La Moncloa, and his number two, Francisco Martínez, are two of the eight defendants who will sit on the bench with a request from the Prosecutor for 15 years in prison. So will part of the police leadership of that time.
Not so the top leader of the PP who has been charged, former number two María Dolores de Cospedal, against whom the judge only saw suspicions and not sufficient evidence, despite the thesis of the Prosecutor’s Office, which always maintained that there was a political plot beyond the Ministry.
Trap Operation
It is already practically giving its last blows and BBVA, its former president Francisco González and some of its former directors are being investigated.
It is number nine and in it the judge has investigated the alleged espionage services entrusted to Villarejo to stop the movement that the construction company Sacyr initiated, without success, to try to take control of the entity.
Projects related to Iberdrola
The judge is investigating whether Iberdrola hired the former commissioner for one million euros between 2004 and 2012 to, among other things, infiltrate platforms contrary to his interests or investigate a shareholder critical of his management. Among the alleged spies is ACS.
The president of the company, Ignaico Sánchez Galán, was one of those investigated until the judge closed the case for him, considering the statute of limitations for the crimes for which he was accused.
Wine Project
The alleged contracting, in 2011 and 2012, from Repsol and Caixabank, of Villarejo companies to investigate the attempted takeover of the oil company by Sacyr and Pemex has been investigated.
Both the two listed companies and their presidents, Antonio Brufau and Isidro Fainé, respectively, were investigated, although the judge, endorsed by the Criminal Chamber, removed them from the case by ruling out that they participated in the assignment to Cenyt.
However, Anticorruption wants both entities, as well as the general administration of the State, to be considered subsidiary civil liability, and requests 40 years for Villarejo, and 28 and 21, respectively, for the former heads of Security at Repsol and Caixabank, Rafael Araujo and Miguel Ángel Fernández Rancaño.
Case of Dina
It is another of the pieces that gained the most political prominence in its day and owes its name to Dina Bousselham, former adviser to Pablo Iglesias. It has revolved around the alleged theft in 2015 of the memory card of his mobile, whose information appeared two years later in a registry to Villarejo, and the judge even went so far as to ask the Supreme Court to indict the then Vice President of the Government and leader of Podemos for crimes such as disclosure of secrets and false accusation and complaint when seeing contradictory versions between him and his former adviser.
The Supreme Court rejected it and finally the judge prosecuted Villarejo and two journalists, the former directors of the extinct magazine “Interviú” Alberto Pozas and Luis Rendueles, into whose hands “part of the information” from that card came, which they later handed over to the ex-commissioner at his request. Both have defended their innocence and have asked the Criminal Chamber to file the case.
The list is long and continues with other alleged assignments, such as the one in which he was allegedly asked to stop the extradition of a shipping company to Guatemala, or the one that the businessman Javier López Madrid would have done to harass Dr. Elisa Pinto.