The Supreme Court has confirmed that the suicide of a director of the public company Mercasa should be considered an accident at work with an orphan’s pension for his young son. The judges understand that the man committed suicide after years of work overload, unaccounted overtime and also after being harassed by colleagues and superiors, as he left in writing in several letters before his death. The courts blame this public company for not having done anything to reduce the psychosocial risks of the work of the deceased, who, in those years, was facing an overload of work due to requests for information from the Civil Guard in the case opened in the National Court on Mercasa.
The man committed suicide at dawn in the bathroom of his house in March 2020. He had worked for two decades as head of planning and control at Mercasa, a state-owned company half-owned by the State Industrial Holdings Corporation (SEPI) and the Spanish Agrarian Guarantee Fund, as well as on the boards of several of its subsidiaries. Minutes before committing suicide, he sent farewell letters to his partner, his son, several colleagues and his boss: “They are cutting staff, they are giving me late notice, they are acting on their own, they are attacking me from above, from below and from the sides. I am a collateral victim of the times,” he said in one of them.
Three days earlier, the worker had gone to the hospital for an anxiety attack, explaining that he had problems at work and that he had not slept more than three hours a night for two weeks. The sentences in the case describe what his last years at Mercasa were like: overtime at home, at night, on weekends and holidays. In part, they explain, to meet the demands of the Civil Guard’s Central Operational Unit (UCO), which at the time was investigating the state-owned company in a corruption case filed before the National Court, pending trial today.
There was also, according to these resolutions, harassment at work. Because in addition to the multiplication of the workload to respond to the requests for information from the Civil Guard regarding the indictment of the business leaders, the deceased had to assume the workload of the financial director for more than six months until he was appointed to a new person in this position. A new director with whom he did not have a good relationship.
Years ago, a psychosocial risk assessment in the company described the risk of “work overload” in this department as “very high”. The Labour Inspectorate also conducted its own investigations.
The suicide of this Mercasa employee was not initially considered an accident at work and his widow, on behalf of her minor son, began to take legal action to have it recognized as such and, in practice, there was an obligation to pay an orphan’s pension to the boy for the loss of his father. A court in Madrid and the High Court of Justice in the capital understood that the suicide was indeed work-related, something that has just been confirmed by the Fourth Chamber of the Supreme Court after rejecting in an order the appeal filed by the State Prosecutor’s Office on behalf of Mercasa.
The judges rejected all the arguments of the Public Prosecutor’s Office and deny, as the company claims, that its case is similar to the one it presented in its last appeal, that of a worker who committed suicide in Barcelona more than two years ago. decades ago. Throughout the judicial process, as elDiario.es was able to verify, both the company and the mutual insurance company tried to demonstrate that his suicide, which occurred at home and outside of working hours, should not have consequences for Mercasa. Linking his death to the health of other family members, defending the fact that suicide is something “multi-causal” but also holding the deceased responsible for having worked so many overtime hours at home.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office, representing Mercasa, went so far as to state that “he was a disorganized person” and that this “cannot be detrimental to the employer”, considering that these are “consequences derived from a voluntary and deliberate act of the worker”. Mercasa, the appeal states, never granted him telework to continue his work from home and, finally, “he was not authorized to work overtime”. Another worker in the same department accumulated 105 hours of overtime, more than four full days of work, according to the resolutions.
Suicide “probably” work-related
From the Social Court of Madrid to the Supreme Court, including the High Court of Justice, all the magistrates specializing in labor matters have confirmed that the suicide of this Mercasa manager and worker was directly related to the work overload and harassment suffered. He took his work home with him, at least since 2019, “on the orders of management”, and in his case “there was a clear link or causal relationship between the suicidal action and work”, contrary to what the company and the mutual insurance company defended.
The evidence gathered during the legal proceedings, said the TSJ of Madrid, reveals “a clear work overload that overwhelmed the deceased worker and forced him to work at night, on weekends and on holidays.” Whether it was organized or not, as Mercasa tried to defend, is not “the subject of this trial,” the judges also reasoned. Their professional situation, they established, “is clearly linked to the suicidal behavior.” He also said this “in all the notes and letters that he left written.”
This “indisputable” link between his suicide and his working conditions, which also include the harassment he reported, clashes, according to the judges, with the company’s attitude in the last years before his death. In the notes he wrote, the deceased “even asks his colleagues for forgiveness, acknowledges that he may have made a mistake, and that he does not deserve to live; justifies his work in the accounts.
The judges have no doubts: “The decision to commit suicide was closely and directly linked to his work, both because of the overload that prevented him from resting properly and having a social and family life, a situation of which the company was aware. Prevention Delegates and did nothing to resolve, such as the situation of harassment reported by the Financial Director.
The case, after the ruling by the Social Chamber of the Supreme Court rejecting the last appeal for the unification of the doctrine of the Public Prosecutor’s Office, is already firmly resolved. In practice, the recognition of your death as an accident at work implies that your minor child is entitled to an orphan’s allowance with a regulatory basis of more than 48,000 annular euros.
Asked by this newspaper, Mercasa expressed its “total and absolute respect” for this order of the Supreme Court. The company also states that it is “firmly committed to ensuring healthy work environments” and that it has “control and monitoring protocols to guarantee healthy environments” subject to “continuous improvements in occupational risk prevention programs for employees.” “The company has internal mechanisms for assessing psychosocial risks and a health and safety committee in which worker representatives participate to evaluate and strengthen at all times the measures that guarantee the well-being of people,” the entity specifies.
Mercasa was chaired at the time of the events by José Ramón Sempere, current general director of the Spanish Railways Foundation. Since last April, the new president of Mercasa is the former Minister of Health, José Miñones. This public company in the food distribution sector has been under the control of the National Court for almost eight years, which began the investigation under the government of Mariano Rajoy and is awaiting trial for an alleged commercial corruption case involving 18 people accused along with the government, the Mercasa company itself and other companies.
Judge Santiago Pedraz, who opened the oral trial in this case more than two years ago, referred to the court several business executives accused of committing irregularities in contracts signed between 2006 and 2016 for the construction of a wholesale market in Angola, with commissions paid to authorities and officials of that country. Investigations are being conducted into, among other things, crimes of corruption, embezzlement, money laundering and criminal organization, and the prosecution has requested sentences of up to 25 years in prison in the most serious cases.
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