One says that a pro-p group G is virtually free if it contains an open free pro-p subgroup. If a virtually free pro-p group is torsion free, i.e. does not have elements of finite order, then by the celebrated theorem of J.-P. Serre G is free pro-p as well. It will be explained in the talk how p-adic integral representations of finite p-groups help to obtain a free pro-p product decomposition for virtually free pro-p-groups having finite centralizers of torsion elements. This result is a generalization of results by D. Haran and I. Efrat who proved the above theorem for the case when G is an extension of a free pro-2 group with a group of order 2. Note that their interest was coming from Galois theory where the finite centralizer condition for torsion elements arises naturally.