He former socialist mayor of the Sevillian municipality of Lebrija Antonio Torres García This Monday, during the trial held against him by the Court of Seville, he defended his hiring as director of external resources in the Andalusian Foundation Training and Employment Fund (Faffe) because, according to him, it was extremely profitable for the defunct entity of the Junta de Andalucía during the eight years it was an employee, from 2003 to 2011. Torres and the former general director of Faffe, Fernando Villén, are accused of alleged crimes of prevarication and embezzlement during the “arbitrary” hiring of the former.
The man who was municipal councilor of the Sevillian city for 24 years reported that after having had two interviews with Villén and giving him his curriculum vitae, he was hired by him with the function of raise funds outside the Junta de Andalucía to finance the activities of the defunct entity dedicated to providing training courses to the unemployed. Questioned by his lawyer, Pablo Ollero, he boasts of his work: “I’m not going to brag but I got two million euros from Faffe and it cost him around 490,000 euros in eight years. La Faffe should have been… He did not finish the sentence but the impression he left was that the entity of the Board of Directors should have been grateful to him and not the other way around.
The former mayor of Lebrija stressed that he had offered his services to Villén, who had hired him as director in July 2003 after having learned “from the Official Journal of the Junta de Andalucía” that the Faffe was going to be created but that ‘he didn’t do it. lose the municipal elections because, After having obtained an absolute majority for 24 years, he decided not to run. In this way, he denied that he was going to “ask for work from the PSOE”.
He presented himself as a “public management professional”.
After learning from “the BOJA” that the Andalusian Government was going to create the Faffe for public training and employment policies, decided to contact its general director to offer his “services as a public management professional”, after having been mayor for 24 years, president of the Community of Municipalities of Lower Guadalquivir, president of the former provincial society Sevilla Siglo XXI and “ten years professor at the University of Seville”.
“I could help Faffe gather resources,” he commented to the anti-corruption prosecutor. He assured that he had agreed to contact Fernando Villén because it was “public” that it was he who had been appointed general director of the entity, in which his brother Manuel Villén held a lower management position.
Visibly nervous during questioning, Torres categorically denied receiving a manager’s salary without doing any work, although he admitted that he did not have a physical office in the autonomous entity because it was not necessary . “The prosecution declared that I limited myself to putting one person in contact with another from my homewho was at home without working; “This does not correspond to reality, for the love of God,” he responded to questions from the lawyer who carries out the popular prosecution for the PP, Alfonso Martínez Escribano.
Subsequently, the accused, for whom the prosecution requires two and a half years in prison for embezzlement and four years of ban for alleged corruption, He explained that his work consisted of promoting the collaboration agreements he had signed with different entities, such as the Ministries of Defense and the Interior, to ensure the training of the military and achieve the professional reintegration of prisoners, but that he was not responsible for carrying them out. .
“I only had one body”
“The only thing I dedicated myself to was pushing. The only thing I needed was to teach the soldiers. I can’t run. I only had one body, but if they asked me, I would have done it“, he commented. He indicated that he had contributed to raising “two million euros in direct resources” for the entity’s policy and the signing of dozens of agreements. He spoke indifferently about 50 or 30 agreements, although only one of them appears as his signature, because due to his position it was not up to him to sign them.
In his statement, Torres also justified that he was not using a corporate email address, but rather his own email address, as he was better known for his former work as a Lebrija municipal councilor. “Should we curse the email I’ve always used?” he quipped.
