Retired Commissioner José Manuel Villarejo next to the National Court, in a picture from 2022.KIKE PARA
The anti-corruption prosecutor’s office has requested five years in prison for retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo and three years in prison for journalists Alberto Pozas and Luis Rendueles for their alleged involvement in the Dina case. The Public Ministry, which attributes to them crimes of discovery and disclosure of secrets, thus carries out the accusation against the three defendants that comes from the Villarejo case, which investigated how the contents of the cell phone of Dina Bousselham, a former advisor of Pablo Iglesias (former secretary general of Podemos and former vice president of the government) came into possession of Villarejo after she reported the theft in late 2015. A portion of the device’s files were also published in several media outlets.
The allegations were made after the criminal chamber of the National Court confirmed in early October the proposal of examining magistrate Manuel García-Castellón to place the three on the bench. As EL PAÍS reported this Friday, Pablo Iglesias and Dina Bousselham, who appear as victims in the case, have requested up to four years in prison for Villarejo, Pozas and Rendueles, from whom they also seek compensation for “moral damage, loss, inconvenience, etc .” demand suffering caused.”
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The beginning of the action in the Dina case dates back to November 2015, when Bousselham and her boyfriend Ricardo de Sa Ferreira were in a shopping center in Alcorcón (Madrid). At the time, Iglesias had just left his position as an MEP, where Bousselham was his adviser. According to the couple’s story, while they were shopping, someone stole a coat in which they kept, among other things, their cell phone. Subsequently, from mid-2016, several media outlets began publishing some of the material stored on the phone. And after Villarejo’s arrest in late 2017, the police internal affairs division found in the corrupt agent’s possession a hard drive and two USB sticks containing copies of the cell phone’s contents.
“One or more people secretly confiscated the personal belongings of Bousselham and his then partner,” say prosecutors Miguel Serrano and César de Rivas. In its indictment, to which EL PAÍS had access, the State Ministry highlights how, just two months later, an “unidentified person” delivered a memory card – containing the consultant’s mobile files – to the headquarters of the Zeta group, publisher of which was not the longer existing magazine Interviú. Two of its journalists (Pozas, director of the publication, and Rendueles) examined the content, which they shared with the group’s president, Antonio Asensio, who decided that nothing would be published.
However, Alberto Pozas and Luis Rendueles made “a complete copy” of the material, the indictment continues. And “at later, unspecified dates” they gave a copy to Villarejo, “whom they normally considered one of their sources of information.” During the judicial investigation phase, the reporters stated that the commissioner contacted them and “demanded” a copy, which they gave him when they understood that the request “came from a senior police officer” and they assumed that ” the use was made”. it would be a legitimate police operation.”
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“Pozas and Rendueles knew that the memory card they gave to Villarejo contained files with internal Podemos documents, various banking details, video and audio files, as well as other documents containing files of a confidential and personal nature. These include photos of Bousselham half-naked and various Telegram chat groups in which other members of the leadership of the above-mentioned political party were registered,” Anticorrupción clarifies. Prosecutors add that Villarejo then handed over all the material “to journalists in his circle of trust so that they could prepare and publish various information, discrediting Podemos and the then Secretary General Pablo Iglesias.”
In the list of suspicious messages allegedly created with information from this stolen phone, the ministry lists information published by the website Okdiario and the newspaper El Confidencial.
In their charging documents, Iglesias and Bousselham already pointed out that there was evidence that Villarejo led a “criminal organization” that received orders from various “persons”, “entities” and “political parties” to carry out “acts of espionage and campaigns”. “In this case, the theft of the mobile device and the dissemination of its contents were clearly intended to harm Iglesias and Podemos by publishing the contents of his personal conversations as well as documents relating to the party of which he was general secretary . To do this, he used the media and relied on a large network of professionals with whom he met regularly,” the indictment of the former vice president of the government continues, who sees the involvement of the “media branch” in the conspiracy as crucial: “ Necessary to indirectly carry out information poisoning campaigns.”
The anti-corruption agency also demands that the three defendants compensate Bousselham with 5,000 euros; and Pablo Iglesias with 1,000 euros. The ministry adds that the general administration of the state is “subsidiarily responsible” for the payment of these amounts.
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