THE Criminal court sentenced the company’s former CEO to 4 years and 6 months in prison, 8 years of absolute prohibition and 12 years of special prohibition. Investment and Venture Capital Management of Andalusia (Invercaria)he socialist Tomas Perez-Sauquillofor a continuing crime of procrastination in medial competition with a crime of embezzlementwith the absolute mitigating circumstance of unjustified delays, for the increase in their own remuneration and those of other commercial workers beyond what is permitted by the laws of Budgets.
The court also sentenced 2 years and 3 months in prison and 3 years and absolute ban to the former CFO of Invercaria Antonio Nieto Garrido as a necessary cooperator in a continuing crime of embezzlement of public funds.
THE Room partially upholds the appeal filed by the public prosecutor against the conviction of Provincial Court of Seville who condemned the former president of Invercarious to 2 years and 3 months in prison and 4 years of absolute disqualification for the offence of embezzlement of public funds, and considered the mitigation of unjustified delays to be highly qualified. For his part, the former financial director was sentenced to 1 year, 1 month and 15 days in prison and 2 years of absolute disqualification.
Aggravation of the penalty
The increased sentence is due to the fact that the Chamber condemns Perez Sauquillo for a crime of procrastination of which he was acquitted by the Provincial Court of Sevillewho understood that this was not an administrative matter, as well as the replacement of the highly nuanced mitigating circumstance of excessive delays with a simple mitigating circumstance.
THE Room remember that the proven facts describe that Perez-Sauquillo, as President and CEO of the public company of Council of Andalusia Invercariahad the power to hire employees for the entity and assign them jobs and salaries. In the exercise of these functions, he personally decided to hire at least Nieto Garrido and several workers, whose salary he set freely without obtaining any report or prior authorization from the General Directorate of Budgets of the Ministry of Economy and Finance, despite the fact that the budget laws required it.
In 2006, the staff of IDEA stopped preparing Invercaria’s payroll according to its instructions and, for a few months, this task was carried out by the company’s own staff, until at the end of that year it was decided to outsource the service and entrust it to a company, which limited itself to preparing the payrolls with the data provided to you by Invercaria.
It is then, according to proven facts, that Tomás Pérez-Sauquillo Pérez“acting in concert with Antonio Nieto Garrido, they decided increase their own remuneration and those of other workers, in order to enrich themselves at the expense of the funds of Invercarious which, as has been said, came from the Ministry through the Agency of Ideas. In defiance of the limits set by successive budgetary laws of the Autonomous Community and without any kind of authorization or knowledge from the Agency of Ideas, the Minister of Innovation or the Ministry of Finance, they increased the salaries…”
The sentence, presentation of the magistrate Ana Ferrerconsiders that regardless of the fact that the employment relationships which Invercarious could maintain with the various contract workers should be subject to the resolution of their disputes in the labor jurisdiction, “this cannot be extrapolated to the activity that the accused carries out as a public manager, in relation to public funds, in his own interest and that of third parties, contravening the administrative rules of budgetary control and exceeding the limits they set, which fits perfectly into the qualification of their acts as administrative matter.
He adds that “it is not only the impact of public funds to be seen through the offence of embezzlement which gives it this character, but also the manifest disregard for administrative legality which determines the acts of Mr. Perez Sauquillo. It is incomprehensible that prevarication evaporates by moving its effectiveness into the field of private contracts, while all the budgetary controls that affected it as a public manager have been consciously avoided, moving away from what for any observer is the general interest to which it must objectively serve. The administration, whatever its scope.
Regarding the other convict, the former financial director, the Room stresses that the applicant’s contribution is limited as being “essential to the fixing of bonuses and salary increases, to the point that the implementation of salary increases beyond the budgetary limits would have been impossible without his assistance. It was up to him to make effective the decisions adopted by the other respondent in this regard, by addressing the appropriate orders to the employees and to the agency responsible for the physical preparation of the payrolls. Without their intervention, such decisions would not have been taken and, consequently, the public funds with which these arbitrary remunerations were paid would not have been reduced.”
Regarding the application of the mitigating circumstance of excessive delay, the court also examines the reason why the prosecutor requested the replacement of the highly qualified personnel, who appreciated the Provincial Courtfor a simple In this sense, the Chamber explains that seven years have passed since the indictment of the accused in this case until the prosecution, “which is of course a long period, it cannot be denied, even sufficient to justify a mitigating circumstance of unjustified delays, but neither extremely excessive, because the assessment requires a qualified mitigating circumstance.
Above all – the judgment says – because “the weighing must be carried out, not so much in terms of the means available to the Administration of Justice, because it is not up to the accused to bear his deficiencies, but rather in terms of the complexity of the case and its duration compared to others with similar characteristics.
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