Fernando Villén sits in the dock for the second time in recent days. This Monday, he declared as accused of having hired “by hand” a mayor of the PSOE, Antonio Torres whose anti-corruption prosecution emphasizes that he has never worked, but that he has earned half a million euros in eight years.
The socialist knows perfectly well what it means to testify before the judge. In fact, he was sentenced to six years in prison for pay more than 30,000 euros in brothels from Seville with the money of the Andalusians.
The figure of Villén is one of those who have remained engraved in the collective imagination of a turbulent era in Andalusia. In fact, the PP began the campaign that led it to seize the hitherto hegemonic Board of Directors of the PSOE at the door of the brothel where this exalted position of the Andalusian Government paid with public money.
Villén, originally from Cádiz since 1959, is only 65 years old. The year he should celebrate his retirement, he is in the dock for a second case of alleged corruption: he is on trial for the hiring of Antonio Torres, former socialist mayor of Lebrija, in the Faffe which he led .
Member of the PSOE for 25 years –was released in 1999-, he guided his career from his native Cádiz to Seville, where he arrived in 2003 to take charge of the technical direction of Faffe.
Training for the unemployed
The Foundation for the Promotion of Training and Employment was an organization created by the board of directors of the PSOE manage educational problems for people who are unemployed or who have had to reinvent themselves in sectors such as agriculture or the naval industry.
But the idea ended badly. On the payroll of the said public foundation – now defunct – there were up to 200 people linked in one way or another to the PSOE and the unions. The suspicion of “plugism” hung over the organization for years.
But the bloodiest case that has reached justice is that of Torres. He himself admitted this Monday to having called Villén because he saw “in BOJA that Faffe was created”. And he offered to work. With two meetings, he already had an offer and a salary which, during the eight years he was employed, brought him almost half a million euros.
Villén, like Torres, now faces the trial which must decide whether the hiring was legal and whether the second one carried out the tasks he allegedly carried out despite the fact that Anti-Corruption and the investigating judge agreed to report him . that no one knew the former PSOE mayor in the Faffe offices.
Brothels
But the big scandal in Villén is not that but the one that has to do with the brothels Don Angelos, Top Show Girls, La Casita or Sala Delux. He spent 32,556 euros there between 2004 and 2010. Faffe will close its doors in 2011, just one year after the last deduction from the Cádiz labor card.
Villén was convicted of embezzlement in the brothel case. He now faces an additional four years in prison for crimes separate from embezzlement and prevarication. In total, a decade sentence if the judge confirms the prosecutor’s request.
In the brothel affair, Villén himself admitted the facts and explained that he had returned the money to the public coffers. False, according to the prosecutor Fernando Sotodelegate in Seville of the Special Prosecutor’s Office against corruption and organized crime. There is no proof, he stressed, of said return of funds.
There is something else that has never been clarified in the case of payments with public money in the brothel because the socialist never explained who he was with when he frequented this establishment and made payments with his work card.
Human resources
The -sordid- history of this chapter of history of Andalusia This is perhaps the most scandalous in Villén’s biography so far. But many doubts also remain about his management regarding the question of Faffe’s human resources.
There were, as reported, up to 200 people on Faffe’s staff. linked to the PSOE or the unions. It was suspected that the foundation operated as an “employment agency” for people linked to the Andalusian government.
Whether or not they were “stoppers”, the staff who worked at the Faffe run by Villén became staff of the Andalusian Employment Service. half a thousand of them They are already undefined. A stable position in the administration which, in many cases, will be legal and legitimate. In others, due to family or ideological affiliation, this is not so much the case.
Since then, the opposition –today the government, the PP, We have always emphasized that Villén was not an isolated case. The popular thesis is that the socialist was part of a widespread conspiracy, as might be the case with the ERE.
ERE case
After the scandal of Labor regulation files, Andalusia now has, in the person of Fernando Villén, a new senior PSOE official sitting on the bench.
The statement heard before Judge Villén this Monday sometimes looked very similar to that heard in the ERE case. “I was looking for a faster way” for the hiring of Torres, said the senior official. The words fit, the music plays too.
