Villarejo praises his role as a victim in the “film” of his cause
As if the “Tandem case” was not already worthy of a movie, the investigated commissioner José Manuel Villarejo yesterday took out his cinephile side to compare his macrocause with Some good men (1992) where “it was ordered to eliminate” one of them. “The Villarejo case is a red code,” he said of himself in one of the last sessions of this trial that has lasted almost a year and that today will be seen for sentencing. Sentence that, by the way, will mark the future of all the matters that remain under investigation (and there are not a few) if the court buys the thesis of bribery to the Prosecutor’s Office.
“Who has been the arsonist, who has been the crazy stirrer of the hornet’s nest”, wondered the commissioner who for an hour and a half tried to dismantle the whole cause. The prosecutors acted under their own interests, Judge Manuel García-Castellón was brought from Rome expressly to lead this matter, the Police manipulated the evidence and behind everything, as always, his archenemy, the former head of the National Intelligence Center (CNI) Félix Sanz Roldan. A whole “conspiracy” against the commissioner who presented himself as the main victim of everything and everyone and denounced the “funny origin” of the proceedings that took him to jail on a provisional basis.
Place to which he will be able to return with a final judgment depending on what the Criminal Chamber of the National High Court rules from this moment on. Anti-corruption, which modified the sentence downwards in mid-June (they initially requested 109), is requesting 83 years behind bars for him because the policeman used his status as a public official to obtain data and information that he later used in his private businesses. For Villarejo, on the other hand, the prosecutors have an “obsession” to paint him as an “abominable subject and greedy for money” when he, in (his) reality, only worked for and for the country.
A string of trips to Syria, Jordan, Iraq or Lebanon, according to his account, to help resolve issues such as 11-M, the GAL, the attacks in Catalonia or threats to the Crown. And the latter, the audios of him by Corinna Larsen with confessions by Juan Carlos I, are the “loot” for which Sanz Roldán insisted on “mounting” the cause, he defended. “What mattered to him, what obsessed him, what worried him were the audios,” he emphasized in a speech that he has repeated ad nauseam over the years.
However, the retired commissioner and his defense tried to tiptoe around his police status when he carried out personal assignments to circumvent the crime of bribery. “Nobody knew Villarejo’s active status in the Police except his direct bosses,” said his lawyer Antonio Cabrera. Something that collides with “everyone knew” how he acted, from Interior Ministers of all colors to Prime Ministers. There were and are “more Villarejos”, they have always defended because they are “necessary for the State”. “If he had not had the conviction of acting as a servant of the State, would he have dared to denounce me? If he had not had the authorization of the governments, would he have risked the unique situation that he had?”
After a very long session of more than two days for his lawyer and more than an hour for him, Villarejo “waived” his right to the last word. “Because he has already exercised it, let’s go,” snapped the president of the Angela Murillo Chamber. “He still had more things, but hey,” the commissioner smiled.
