Tomás Pérez-Sauquillo, who was president of the Andalusian government’s venture capital company, Invercaria, between 2005 and 2010, has accumulated convictions. The Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court (TS) has doubled the sentence imposed on this former senior official of the Junta de Andalucía during the PSOE period. for having “enriched” himself and other executives of the autonomous company by paying bonuses which were illegal to the detriment of public funds. Their salaries and those of other employees of the company were higher than what was authorized by the budget laws of the Council.
The TS imposed four years and six months of imprisonment, eight years of absolute prohibition and twelve years of special prohibition, with the unconditional mitigating circumstance of excessive delay, on the former chairman and CEO of the Business Investment and Venture Capital Management of Andalusia (Invercaria) Tomás Pérez-Sauquillo for a continuing crime of prevarication in a media competition with a crime of embezzlement.
The sentence is increased because the Supreme Court considers that his conduct is crime of prevarication of which He was acquitted by the Provincial Court of Seville, that it was understood that it was not an administrative matter, as well as the replacement of the highly qualified mitigating circumstance of unjustified delay by a simple circumstance, according to the judgment issued by the Press Office of the High Court of Justice of Andalusia.
This is part of what is called the macro-cause of corruption in Invercaria, a judicial dinosaur that gained weight until it split into more than thirty pieces which are the subject of separate lawsuits: one for each aid distributed, according to investigators, “arbitrarily” between companies, many of which ended up closing. In this case, it focuses on the “excessive” remuneration that the directors received from the coffers of the Junta de Andalucía.
Tomás Pérez Sauquillo, president of the public company Invercaria from 2005 to 2010, accumulates four convictions in different pieces of evidence of the case, which totals eleven years in prison. On the other hand, he was acquitted in the trials concerning the aid granted to the companies Juana Martín, Lolita Canalla, Own&Spa and FIVA.
Former Invercaria CFO also sentenced
The court also sentenced him to two years and three months in prison and three years of absolute disqualification. Former CFO of Invercaria Antonio Nieto Garrido as a necessary cooperator in an ongoing crime of embezzlement of public funds.
The House partially considers the appeal filed byThe Public Prosecutor’s Office against the decision of the Provincial Court of Seville which sentenced the former president of Invercaria to two years and three months in prison and four years of absolute disqualification for the crime of embezzlement of public funds, in the so-called personal room, and considered the mitigating circumstance of unjustified delays to be highly qualified. For his part, the former financial director was sentenced to one year, one month and 15 days in prison and two years of absolute disqualification.
The Court recalls that the proven facts describe that Pérez-Sauquillo, as President and CEO of the public company of the Junta de Andalucía Invercaria, had theThe 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 budgetary laws required it.
In 2006, IDEA staff stopped preparing Invercaria’s payroll according to its instructions, and during For several 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 payroll with the data provided to it by Invercaria.
It is then, according to proven facts, that Tomás Pérez-Sauquillo Pérez, “acting in concert with Antonio Nieto Garrido, has decided to increase his own remuneration and those of other workers, in order to enriching themselves at the expense of Invercaria funds which, as has been said, came from the Ministry through the IDEA Agency. “In defiance of the limits set by successive budgetary laws of the Autonomous Community and without any type of authorization or knowledge from the public body IDEA, the Minister of Innovation or the Ministry of Finance, they increased the salaries…”
The sentence, presentation of Judge Ana Ferrerconsiders that regardless of whether the employment relationships that Invercaria could maintain with the various contract workers should be subject to the resolution of their disputes before the labour court, “this cannot be extrapolated to the activity that the accused carries out as a public manager, with regard to public funds, in their own interest and that of third parties, contravene the administrative rules of budgetary control and exceed the limits set thereinwhich fits perfectly into the classification of its acts as administrative matters.
He adds that “it is not only the impact of public funds observed through the crime of embezzlement that attributes this character, but also the manifest disregard for administrative legality that determines the actions of Mr. Pérez-Sauquillo. We cannot understand that prevarication evaporates by moving its effectiveness to the domain of private contracts, when all the control budgets that affected him as a public manager were deliberately circumvented, deviating from what is required for any observer by the general interest that the Administration must objectively serve, whatever its scope.
Regarding the other convicted person, the former financial director, the Chamber stresses that the applicant’s contribution is limited to “essential in setting bonuses and salary increases, to the point that it would have been impossible without their help to implement salary increases beyond the budgetary limits. It was up to him to implement the decisions adopted by the other defendant in this regard, by addressing the appropriate orders to the employees and the management office responsible for the physical establishment of the payrolls. Without their intervention, such decisions would not have been implemented and public funds would not have been reduced. with which these arbitrary remunerations were paid.
Mitigating due to delays in the process
Regarding the application of the mitigating circumstance of undue delay, the court also considers the prosecutor’s reason for requesting the replacement of the highly qualified prosecutor, which the Provincial Court appreciated, by a simple one. In this sense, the Chamber explains that seven years have passed since the indictment of the accused in this case until the trial, “which of course This is a long period, it cannot be denied, even long enough to justify a mitigation of unjustified delays.but not extremely excessive, because the assessment requires a qualified mitigating circumstance.
“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 the deficiencies, but rather in terms of the complexity of the case and its duration in comparison with others with similar characteristics,” adds the resolution.
