Aguirre asked Villarejo that his association let the case of his escape on Madrid's Gran Vía die

Esperanza Aguirre narrowly avoided the dock for his flight from the Municipal Police after parking badly on Gran Vía street in Madrid. In July 2015, more than a year after the incident, the Madrid court investigating the case decided to file it definitively for a reason of form and not of substance: it was being investigated for lack of disobedience and the reform that the Government of the PP had launched that same month had decriminalized that offense. But before, according to the audios revealed this Tuesday The country newspaperasked the commissioner José Manuel Villarejo that his association, which exercised the popular accusation, let the case die.

Villarejo noted the maneuvers with a dean judge from Madrid to save Esperanza Aguirre from the bench

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The meeting between the two, according to the audios revealed by the newspaper, took place on September 11, 2014 with José Luis González Armengol as mediator. The former magistrate had served as dean judge of Madrid until June of that year and had already signed for the legal advice of El Corte Inglés. Villarejo, for his part, had a good part of Esperanza Aguirre's procedural destiny in her hands: her association Transparency and Justice was exercising the popular accusation in a case that had come to trial after several files and reopenings.

For Aguirre, who at that time was trying to be a PP candidate for the Madrid City Council after leaving the Community in 2012, it was key that this case ended before reaching trial. She explicitly asked him not to ask for more errands. "I only promise what I am going to fulfill," Villarejo told him, promising not to do so. "What you're telling me is music to my ears," Aguirre said, relieved.

At that time it was not public and notorious that Villarejo was behind the association Transparency and Justice, created in 2005. It was in 2017 when the accusations and the Prosecutor's Office, in the case of little Nicolás who blew up the war between commissioners, demanded his expulsion from the case for his relationship with the then-retired commissioner. David Macías, a lawyer currently on trial for his role as an alleged collaborator of Villarejo, was the legal representative of the association.

The role of Transparency and Justice in the case of Esperanza Aguirre was decisive. In May 2015, the Madrid Court ordered Aguirre to be tried, but in a misdemeanor trial, not for a crime, and Transparency and Justice did not appeal although, as a popular accusation, she was the only one entitled to do so. At first, a resource from the same association had taught Aguirre the way to the bench: "Transparency and Justice is my executioner," Aguirre openly told the commissioner in the conversations revealed on Tuesday.

Pomegranates, a “choricete”

another one of the conversations revealed by El País between Esperanza Aguirre and José Manuel Villarejo Pérez took place that same September 11, 2014, but not about their incident on Gran Vía, but about the corruption in the Popular Party. It was the police who defined Alfredo Prada, former vice president of his executive, as "choricete". “But come on, yes, yes. And so it goes on, earning bonuses in the PP (...) Yes. That's why I kicked it out. Granados too, that's why I kicked him out,” Aguirre says, including her former right-hand man, Francisco Granados.

Francisco Granados was arrested a month and a half after that conversation, accused of leading the Punic plot of corruption in various municipalities in the region together with businessman David Marjaliza. "Granados had already lost my confidence a long time ago," Aguirre said after learning of his arrest. Currently, Aguirre is imputed in one of the pieces separated from that same cause while waiting to know if it is sent to trial.