The Third Section of the Court of Seville plans to begin this Thursday of this new week the trial against the former technical general director of the Andalusian Foundation Training and Employment Fund. (Faffe) Fernando Villén and the former socialist mayor of Lebrija Antonio Torres Garcia, for the alleged crimes of prevarication and embezzlement arising from the “unfair and arbitrary” hiring of the aforementioned former first mayor of Faffe, contrary to the principles of equality, merit and capacity and due only to the “affinity and personal and political connection” between the two.
Just a year ago, the Court of Seville sentenced Fernando Villén to six years in prison for a continuing crime of embezzlement in competition with a continuing crime of falsifying an official document as an incentive, for payments in hostess clubs with bank cards of the aforementioned public entity, belonging to the Junta de Andalucía.
In relation to this other case that will be judged this week, the reinforcement judge of the Court of Instruction number six of Seville, Jose Ignacio Vilaplana, stated in its order transforming the procedure into an abbreviated procedure that “the procedures carried out clearly show the existence of serious rational indications of criminality which allow the attribution to the accused Fernando Villén Rueda and Antonio Torres García of their participation in the commission of crimes of prevarication and embezzlement.
Specifically, the judge indicated that after Antonio Torres lost the office of the mayor of Lebrija In the 2003 municipal elections, after 24 years in power, he allegedly asked the technical general director of the Andalusian Foundation Training and Employment Fund for his “internship at Faffe, to which Villén accepted, promoting in his favor a new management position, which in reality did not exist, which would satisfy the conditions of permanent employment and salary requested by the already former socialist mayor of Lebrija.
No training or skills
All this, despite the fact that Torres García “lacked training and skills assume functions corresponding to said professional level of manager.
Thus, and according to the investigating judge, the former mayor of Lebrija “was hired on July 1, 2003 with a temporary contract, extended and made permanent with an effective date of December 1, 2004”, as a manager, with a total remuneration of 46,750 euros per yearbeing registered as an employee at Faffe until his termination of employment and his integration in May 2011 into the Andalusian Employment Service (SAE).
The hiring, according to the investigating judge, took place, “without any evaluation process or contrast of the subject’s suitability or fitness to hire”, i.e. “unfairly and arbitrarilyin disregard of the hiring procedures that Faffe had to comply with, without any participation of other possible candidates for the position, and in a manner contrary to the general principles of publicity, objectivity, impartiality, equal opportunities, merit and capacity that must govern the said selection and hiring process, in accordance with the regulations themselves.
“There is no documentation that reveals a minimum respect for the requirements and budgets that govern the selection and hiring of personnel, whether technical or managerial, by a company. public foundation like Faffe”, determines the investigating judge.
Added to this, as the judge specifies in the order, is that the administrative organization chart of the Faffe “did not envisage any management position which” the former mayor under investigation could access, therefore the other defendant “He came to create an ‘ad hoc’ one which he called the Directorate of External Relations”a department that “was in reality non-existent, so it lacked structure, functions and effective content; with no physical headquarters, no offices, no desks, no assigned staff.
I wasn’t going to Faffe’s headquarters
In fact, the judge warns that the former mayor “did not even go to the headquarters of the foundation, and he didn’t do any work (he was unknown to other workers and managers), although he had obtained business or presentation cards”, so that “the limited activity carried out, limited to specific contacts with a politician or authority”, was “always” carried out from home “and with his own resources, computer and free generic email account.”
As a result, “investigator Antonio Torres would have occupied a higher level position, non-existent in the Faffe organization, without a specific mission and, finally, without doing any real work, with the acceptance and approval of Fernando Villén, which would have allowed Torres García to collect 491,203.03 euros» until 2020“without it being recorded that he actually worked, also benefiting from the advantages of a fictitious registration with social security, and finally being integrated into the Andalusian Employment Service after the extinction of the Faffe, without any more merit than his affinity and his personal and political links with Villén Rueda”, summarizes the judge, who thus orders the continuation of the procedure according to the abbreviated procedure.
Based on these alleged facts, the Prosecutor’s Office is requesting a four-year prison sentence against Fernando Villén for the alleged crime of embezzlement and ten years of special ban for a possible crime of embezzlement; while for the former mayor of Lebrija, he demands two and a half years in prison for embezzlement and four years of forfeiture for alleged embezzlement.
