The National Court frees retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo from a new sentence. And there are three of them. The Appeals Chamber acquitted the former police officer for the espionage work he carried out for Repsol and CaixaBank in 2011 and 2012 with the aim of obtaining sensitive information from former Sacyr Vallehermoso president Luis del Rivero to prevent the takeover of the Spanish oil company. The court of the Fourth Criminal Chamber sentenced him to eight years in prison for four offenses of discovering and disclosing secrets to individuals, which have now come to nothing due to the statute of limitations.
The magistrates explain in their judgment that the crime of discovery and disclosure of secrets with which Villarejo and his partner in the Cenyt Group – the commissioner’s business network – were accused, the lawyer Rafael Redondo (sentenced to six years in prison, which was also revoked) was time-barred at the start of the investigation in December 2019. The period for which criminal liability expires for the crime of discovery is normally five years, although when prosecuted in relation to the crime of discovery corruption, said the maximum term had been increased to 10 years. However, the defendants were acquitted of the charge of corruption, so the Appeals Chamber understands that the statute of limitations reverts to its original term and expired five years after it was committed.
In this way, the Appeals Chamber accepted the appeals presented by Villarejo and Redondo and rejected that of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, which requested to increase the sentence imposed, understanding that the circumstances existed to convict for corruption.
With this last sentence, Villarejo accumulates a new victory. Of the nearly 200 years in prison that Anti-Corruption requested against the former police officer during the first six trials of the Villarejo affairin total, he was only sentenced to 24 years in prison. Corruption has been key to this significant reduction, as it is crime that underlies the macro cause. In four cases this charge was overturned.
Likewise, last October, the National Court acquitted him of three other offenses attributed to him by the anti-corruption prosecution for having carried out what is called Saving the projecta spy mission financed in 2011 by the late businessman José Moya, former president of the Persan company, in order to gather information that would allow him to resolve the conflict he had with the real estate company Martin Fadesa. For these facts, the public prosecutor requested 23 years in prison.
A month later, the second exemption arrived. The court considered that it was not proven that the agent participated in a espionage mission that his business group received in 2015, and which consisted of collecting confidential data from a businessman from Marbella (Málaga). The prosecution requested an additional nine years in prison.
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