The Hearing for the feet of the Prosecutor's Office in the Villarejo case: "It is not precise in the least"
José Manuel Villarejo appeared again this Monday before the National Court. After his sentence to 19 years in prison in the first trial of the macro-cause, the accusations wanted his return to prison to be agreed, but the request ended up turning against the Prosecutor's Office: “It is not precise in the least,” criticized the magistrates in response to his warning about the alleged flight risk. “Not every purpose justifies the deprivation of liberty of the accused or defendant”. The resolution represents a setback for the Prosecutor's Office, and even more so when the sentence itself was already far from the objectives that were set in its indictment.
Villarejo has been free for more than two years and, according to the National Court, other “circumstances” must be taken into account that the Prosecutor's Office has ignored when requesting his return to prison: he has responded to “all the appeals emanating from this court”, he has appeared at all “the sessions of the oral trial” in which he has been required and, as soon as this first sentence was notified to the parties, he has appeared “without delay at the Secretary of this Court despite the fact that it was perfect aware of the mistake”. For the magistrates, there is no doubt that these “concurrent particularities (…) play in favor” of Villarejo and force them to reject the request of the Prosecutor's Office.
According to the magistrates, neither Villarejo has been convicted of committing “an extremely serious crime” nor has the Prosecutor's Office clarified “what are those circumstances” that force him to be imprisoned again. The resolution points out that the “effective compliance” of the sentence would not even be 19 years, but 12: the law sets the maximum at triple the highest sentence that has been imposed and in this specific case they are four years for the crime of revealing secrets. Regarding the alleged flight risk, the accusations have provided information that “apparently” appears in other lines of investigation and that “cannot be taken into consideration here”.
This decision is still appealable within three days, but for the moment it leaves the commissioner with the same measures that were imposed on him in 2021: appearing in court every fifteen days, prohibition to leave Spain and withdrawal of his passport: ” Proportionality requires not only that the measure be adequate to fulfill a constitutionally legitimate purpose, but also that the sacrifice imposed on the freedom of the person be reasonable in comparison with the importance of the purpose of the measure.”.
A headache for the Prosecutor's Office
Beyond this last resolution, the first conviction of Villarejo will have consequences in the dozens of pieces that the macro-cause accumulates. The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor is aware that the sentence is key and, already at the start of the trial in 2021, it chose to close agreements with a dozen of the defendants to try to shield their indictment: in exchange for acknowledging the facts, it lowered their request for a sentence of less than two years in prison so that they would not go to prison and, at the same time, managed to reinforce his version in order to corner the rest. However, this strategy did not work with the considered hard core of the commissioner.
The first sign that the accusation was being diluted came in the final stretch of the trial, when the Prosecutor's Office lowered the requests for conviction of the main protagonists of the case.. Among them, Villarejo himself, who went from facing 83 and a half months in jail compared to the initial 109 and 10 months. This change also benefited the commissioner's wife, Gemma Alcalá, her son, José Manuel Villarejo Gil, the lawyer David Macías and the ex-policemen Antonio Bonilla and Constancio Riaño. Except for Villarejo, who has finally been sentenced to 19 years in prison, the National Court has acquitted all the others: of the 26 defendants, only 10 have ended up being sentenced.
As El Confidencial reported last week, to this is added that the first sentence rules out the commission of bribery, which is the key crime for the rest of the macro-cause. “The activity carried out by the commissioner was in no way intended to undermine the legitimacy and criteria of action of the Public Administration, but to obtain greater private benefits, offering a series of services that are difficult to achieve, at least through legal channels,” concludes the court.
By dismissing the crime of bribery, the court throws the rest of the case on its head. Everything indicates that the Prosecutor's Office will now appeal this sentence, but in just nine days, the Villarejo case has taken a 180 degree turn. As the magistrates warn in their resolution on Monday, “the conviction (…) only constitutes a temporary confirmation of the evidence of guilt” and, until further notice, they are not even sufficient to agree to re-entry Villarejo to prison.