'Little Nicolás' and Villarejo monopolize the agenda of the Madrid Court this new judicial year

They face sentences of between four and nine years in prison for various crimes, including revealing secrets.

MADRID, 3 Sep. (EUROPA PRESS) -

Francisco Nicolás Gómez Iglesias, known as 'Little Nicolás', and the retired commissioner José Manuel Villarejo monopolize the court agenda of the Provincial Court of Madrid in this new judicial year with procedures that include alleged crimes of revealing secrets and attempted fraud .

'Little Nicholas' faces 15 years and nine months in prison for two cases against him; one for having allegedly accessed police databases and another for an attempted fraud by posing as a government adviser. For the commissioner, the Prosecutor's Office asks for four years in prison for recording and broadcasting a meeting between agents of the National Police and the National Intelligence Center (CNI) on the investigation regarding the young Gómez Iglesias.

The first of the trials will take place on October 25 and 26. 'Little Nicolás' is accused of having accessed "on several occasions" to "information of a confidential nature belonging to the Ministry of the Interior that was stored in police databases."

The Prosecutor's Office asks for nine years and nine months in prison for integration into a criminal group, a continued crime of discovery and disclosure of secrets and violation of secrets as an inducer and a crime of active bribery. The State Attorney's Office, which decided to withdraw, will not participate in this procedure.

Those days will also sit on the bench of the accused the former Security Coordinator of the Madrid City Council, Emilio García-Grande, the civil guard Francisco Javier Sánchez López, the municipal police officers Jorge González Hormigos and Felipe Gallego Santos, and the municipal employee Jose Luis Gonzalez Cervera.

According to the investigation, the 'modus operandi' "was always the same": Gómez Iglesias provided one or more of those investigated with vehicle registration plates, telephone lines or identification numbers. "Then, taking advantage of their status as agents of the Municipal Police Corps of the Madrid City Council, they proceeded to extract the required information from said databases and provided it to Francisco Nicolás in exchange for promises and economic remuneration," the judge said when he told him process.

The next trial will be on November 8, although in this case Gómez Iglesias does not appear as a defendant. On this occasion the person who will sit on the bench will be Villarejo, for recording and broadcasting a meeting between agents of the National Police and the National Intelligence Center (CNI) on the investigation related to 'Little Nicolás'.

The commissioner will be accompanied by his wife Gemma Alcalá, and the journalist Carlos Mier for an alleged crime of discovery and revelation of secrets. Trial sessions are scheduled to last until December 2.

For this reason, Villarejo faces the request of four years in prison made by the Prosecutor's Office, considering him the alleged perpetrator of the crime of discovery and disclosure of secrets. The Public Ministry concluded that his wife and the journalist acted as necessary collaborators, for which it demands sentences of three years in prison for them.

The events date back to a meeting held on October 20, 2014 between the commissioner then head of the Internal Affairs Unit Marcelino Martín Blas and some CNI agents to whom he was going to inform about the ongoing investigation into Gómez Iglesias.

The content of the meeting was recorded and later broadcast on the Sensitive Information portal, of which Alcalá was the owner, and in which Mier worked. The prosecutor's brief details how they would have perpetrated the acts imputed to them.

After three years of investigation, Villarejo, Alcalá and Mier were prosecuted, but not Gómez Iglesias, who was left out of this separate piece due to lack of evidence against him. The head of the Court of Instruction number 2 of Madrid, Pilar Martínez Gamo, sent the commissioner to the bench for ordering the journalist "carry out the recording" to "know its content and disclose it for spurious purposes" in the medium owned by his wife.

A third trial will be held on February 6 and 13, 2023 and will be related to the attempted scam that 'Little Nicolás' would have committed in 2014 against businessman Javier Martínez de la Hidalga, before whom he presented himself as an advisor to the former vice president of the Government Soraya Sáenz de Santamaría to facilitate the sale of a property that this person had in Toledo.

As explained by the previous instructor of the case, Arturo Zamarriego, in a car with which he was prosecuted in June 2018, Gómez Iglesias asked the businessman for 300,000 euros and also made him believe that a Treasury embargo on your accounts and those of your family.

In October 2014, he met with Martínez de la Hidalga at a Banco Santander branch and there, in a meeting with its director, he presented himself as an advisor to Sáenz de Santamaría. The businessman asked to withdraw from the entity half a million that he had deposited there.

As the banker expressed his reservations about the requirements of the legislation on the prevention of money laundering, Gómez Iglesias would have simulated a call to Sáenz de Santamaría and later stated that there would be no problems with that matter. In the course of said meeting, according to the order, "Little Nicolás" left a "dossier" on the office table with the letterhead of "Government of Spain".

In this procedure, Gómez Iglesias faces six years in prison requested by the Prosecutor's Office and the State Attorney's Office for the continued crimes of usurpation of public functions and falsehood in an official document in competition with one of falsehood.

On the sidelines, Villarejo will also have to go to the Madrid Court as a witness, in a trial that will be held on January 31, 2023. This case focuses on Ali Shan and Ijaz Ahmad, who were hired by the General Directorate of the Police to participate in the investigation carried out by the Central Unit for Specialized and Violent Crime (UCDV) to translate intercepted telephone conversations in the framework of an investigation conducted by the Investigating Court number 5 of Fuenlabrada (Madrid).

The businessman Harischandra Tarachand Varma, one of those investigated in said procedure and who had had several conversations intervened, reported in April 2014 to Internal Affairs that the translators had extorted him. According to the letter from the Public Prosecutor's Office, they offered him information on the case in exchange for an initial payment of 10,000 euros that would increase and they threatened to "influence him" if he did not agree.

For his part, Villarejo is waiting for the Madrid Court to set a date for the trial in which the Prosecutor's Office asks for a sentence of 13 years and two months in prison for the alleged threats and coercion that "repeatedly" and "insistently "They made Dr. Elisa Pinto so that she would not denounce the businessman Javier López Madrid.