Julián Muñoz has clashed with the Justice several times throughout his life. After becoming a councilor in Marbella in 1991 with the help of Jesus Gil, He ended up as mayor of the corporation after the resignation of the former president of Atlético de Madrid due to the ‘T-shirts case’.

In 2002, Muñoz was appointed mayor thanks to the absolute majority of the GIL, revalidating his position in the municipal elections of 2003. That year, however, would not be a good one for him. In June his salary was seized, and he ended up being fired. Juan Antonio Roca (urban planning manager for more than a decade and mastermind of the corrupt Malaya plot) and in July a motion of censure removes him from the City Council.

Accused in the ‘Proinsa case’in September the trial began where the prosecutor requested 18 months in prison and eight months of disqualification against him for a building permit in 1999 (he chaired the Government Commission that authorized it). He would end up sentenced to six months in prison and eight years of disqualification for employment and public office for an urban planning crime, in the case ‘Banana Beach’.

The Malaya case breaks out

But his luck did not improve and, seven years later, he was put in shackles for alleged bribery and embezzlement of public funds: on July 19, 2006, Muñoz was in the third phase of the ‘Operation Malaya’, the most important real estate and institutional corruption plot in Spain to date.

During his pre-trial detention, Muñoz was convicted in several cases for bribery, misappropriation of public funds and urban planning malfeasance related to the granting of illegal licenses during the municipal governments of the GIL.

After serving three quarters of these sentences, Muñoz was released in 2008 after almost two and a half years behind bars. But in 2013 he was sentenced to a further seven and a half years in prison for malfeasance and acquitted of the crimes of embezzlement of public funds and the subsidiary or alternative crime of fraud. In addition, in October 2013 he was sentenced by the Provincial Court of Malaga to another two years in prison for Malaya.

Health problems

During this period, his health deteriorated: in the last two years in prison, he was forced to visit the hospital 29 times. The prison’s own medical assistant director reported that Muñoz’s risk of death in the medium term was over 50% despite continuous medical care. For this reason, he was initially granted third degree in August 2015. The Málaga Court annulled this decision, but exempted him from attending the trial of the ‘Fergocon case’.

On 6 May 2016, he was finally released from prison and went on to serve his third year in the Social Insertion Centre of Algeciras, where he spent five years. Then, in 2021, the Penitentiary Surveillance Court of the National Court granted him conditional release, despite the fact that he had not yet served three-quarters of his sentence.