Internal Affairs will review 2.3 million leads provided by BBVA on the Villarejo case
Madrid
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The head of the Central Court of Instruction number 6 of the National Court has entrusted the Internal Affairs Unit to carry out a search for words on the orders of former commissioner José Manuel Villarejo among the 2.3 million "hits" possibly related to his work for BBVA that isolated the Price Waterhouse Coopers consultancy during the forensic preparation.
In a car issued this Tuesday to which ABC had access, he thus resolved that the investigating unit search among those more than two million milestones "the names of the assignments entrusted to Mr. Villarejo and the main investigated in said projects, according to the documentation seized in his possession. Once the search is completed, the result will be made available to the Court and the gross will be returned to the bank.
The facts reflect the documentation that the bank has been contributing to the cause opened by the orders that for 13 years Villarejo invoiced the bank for an amount greater than 10.28 million euros for the performance of "multiple intelligence services and / or investigation of a patrimonial nature ", tasks of an" illegal nature "because he was a public official and which involved" repeated interference in the fundamental rights "of third parties.
To prepare its forensic on these commercial relationships of the bank with the Villarejo business network, PwC carried out a keyword search in archives of BBVA systems ranging from emails to invoices and in a report that was provided to the court, he said he had found 2.3 million "hits" or positive results, although he never came to provide all of them. Many could be false positives.
BBVA has always argued that one thing is the work of Pwc as forensic experts and another, its role in this matter, which is, as a recent letter to the court said, "to assist the legal defense in the design of the strategy defense of the Entity in criminal proceedings. "It is, therefore, part of the defense team"They alleged, to substantiate the preservation of the findings, given that they have a duty of confidentiality.
“PwC has not been released from its duty of professional secrecy to indiscriminately deliver documentation (especially when it affects the hard core of the Entity's right of defense). Not at all ”, said that letter from BBVA last June.
However, they agreed to present the 223 items at the request of the Court, which warned the PwC experts of disobedience if they did not do so, but as long as certain "conditions and limitations" were respected in their analysis: they were organized by groups and 100 of them, were marked as for the sole access of the judge and the Prosecutor's Office "for the purposes that they may verify its absolute irrelevance for the judicial investigation, thus avoiding that they can be disseminated to the rest of the parties and made public outside the Instruction ".
Anti-corruption questions transparency
But there were only 223 out of a universe of 2.3 million hits identified by PwC that accusations such as the one exercised by the president of Ausbanc, Luis Pineda, had been claiming to understand that it should not be the person under investigation who decides what information is relevant to the case. BBVA, finally, offered in writing its willingness to deliver the entirety, although it did not agree with the claims of the parties: they saw a prospective cause and a diligence that, in addition, was going to entail an economic cost.
For the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office "It cannot be shared" that BBVA's actions "are transparent" for while it "offers without ceasing, without obligation to do so, the entire result of an internal investigation, forensic investigation that was never ordered by the Court, (...) opposes for reasons of protection of professional secrecy and other reasons to the incorporation of hits requested by some parties, hits that have been identified by PwC, and even in the specific reports entrusted to PwC not more than the hits selected by BBVA lawyers are included «.
In their report on this matter, the prosecutors pointed out that “BBVA does not contribute the hundreds of thousands of hits that they have considered relevant for the investigation and that are classified from highest to lowest relevance in reds, oranges and yellows according to the heat map provided from among the millions of hits found. It is the map that PwC drew up and reported to the Court.
"Efficiency and speed"
“This implies that an important selection has already been made, ruling out many false positives. But it it does so without sufficiently explaining, furthermore, why it considers them "relevant", since it has been qualifying as "not relevant" many keywords and information expressly requested by the Instructor and by the Prosecutor's Office, "the letter added.
He claimed the entire content, the 2.3 million hits, to be analyzed in court and the interesting ones, to be incorporated into the case.
The judge agrees with them in part, because indeed, he is claiming BBVA for the contribution of those 2.3 million "hits", but for "efficiency and speed", he agrees that the Internal Affairs Unit analyze them, not one by one , if not from his own list of keywords extracted from this separate piece of the Villarejo case and that they may thus be related to the assignments that are the object of the investigation.
«Pretend to require PwC to contribute all of the more than two million hits and then proceed to a blind search, would suppose the judicial collapse, making diligence impossible, "says García Castellón.
In this way, the order adds, "this Magistrate is the one who already filters the search, clearly delimiting the criteria, as requested by the Public Prosecutor, although the UAI is in charge of the materialization of the diligence."
Following the notification of the order, the bank has issued a statement in which «positively values this judicial resolution, which allows progress in the investigation of the National Court "which" is the one that prevails over any other and the one that should clarify what happened.
