Cases against companies for corruption doubled in the last year

While the cases of Koldo García, former advisor to former Minister José Luis Ábalos; of the former president of the Royal Spanish Football Federation Luis Rubiales and the partner of the Madrid president, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, shake the political and media landscape, and parliamentary investigation commissions are being prepared, the courts continue to hand down sentences for corruption. Last year there were 56, of which a third (18) were acquittals. In those where sentences were imposed, 15 were imposed after reaching an agreement between the defendants and the Prosecutor's Office for the sentence; 20, without that agreement, and the remaining three were only partially condemnatory, as detailed in the Data Repository on Corruption Processes of the General Council of the Judiciary. The judges issued an indictment order or oral trial against 256 people in the 32 proceedings for corruption crimes concluded last year. Of them, 71 were legal entities (companies and other entities with rights and obligations).

The figures of the resolutions are lower than those of 2022, when the Spanish courts issued 61 sentences. So, there were 16 acquittals. For this year, there are thirty trials pending for some of the major causes of corruption, such as Gürtel cases, Lezo and Punic, who seat former leaders of the PP on the bench. This information repository collects data from the third quarter of 2015 to the present, both nationally and by autonomous community. Publicly accessible, it uses as indicators of the fight against corruption the number of accused and/or prosecuted, of procedures, of sentences handed down and their meaning, and the number of prisoners for these crimes. It is updated every three months.

The information is limited to so-called public corruption, both administrative and political, that is, that which affects officials and public officials in the exercise of their functions, and that affects public money. Under the generic concept of corruption, a long list of crimes is included, such as urban prevarication, prevarication of public officials, infidelity in the custody of documents and violation of secrets, bribery, influence peddling, embezzlement, fraud and illegal exactions, negotiations and activities prohibited to public officials and abuses in the exercise of their functions and receipt and money laundering.

There is a second figure from the update of this database that draws attention: the judges issued an indictment order or oral trial against 256 people in the 32 proceedings for corruption crimes concluded last year. Of them, 71 were legal entities (companies and other entities with rights and obligations). The vast majority, in courts of Andalusia (64), followed at a great distance by those of Madrid (five) and the Valencian Community (two). This number is double the previous year, when there were 36, although it is equal to the figures for 2021. Between 2018 and 2020, the figures had been between 30 companies in the first of those years and 49 in the last. We must not forget that the accusation of companies and other entities in criminal cases is a relatively new concept in the Penal Code, in which it was introduced in 2010 and profoundly reformed five years later. Previously, it was considered that legal entities could not commit crimes.

The number of companies prosecuted for corruption will foreseeably increase in the coming years once Spain transposed in February of last year – belatedly – ​​the 2019 European directive known as Whistleblowing (“reporting of irregularities or corrupt practices”), by which companies with more than 50 workers must have an internal channel for reporting irregularities, providing protection to any person who, from within an organization, whether a private company or an administration body, denounces irregularities known to it.

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Although at first the obligation to have this mailbox only affected large companies with more than 250 workers, since last December all companies with workforces exceeding fifty employees must have this channel or, otherwise, They are exposed to fines of up to one million euros. Public companies, political parties, unions, business organizations and foundations are also required to create this reporting channel if they receive or manage public funds.

The rest of the defendants, 185, were natural persons, with a clear predominance of men (152) over women (33). The previous year there had been fewer, 164, divided into 138 men and 26 women. By community, the courts of Andalusia were also those that prosecuted the most people, 125, followed by those of Madrid (22) and the Valencian Community (21). However, the reflection of all this in prisons is small. According to the statistics of the three administrations that manage the prisons in Spain – the Ministry of the Interior, the Catalan Generalitat and the Basque government – as of January 1, 2024, there were 91 prisoners in them for a crime linked to corruption, of which 35 were in prison. specifically for embezzlement, followed by bribery (22). On that date, the prison population amounted to 56,979 inmates.

The data are known at a time when corruption has once again been among the top 10 concerns of Spaniards in the March opinion barometer of the Center for Sociological Research (CIS). In this latest survey, 12.2% of those surveyed cited it among the top three, compared to 4.9% the previous month, when it occupied eighteenth place. Between one poll and another, precisely, the Koldo casein which an alleged plot is being investigated that rigged public contracts for the purchase of masks at the worst moment of the pandemic, but the scandals affecting Rubiales and Ayuso had not yet broken out.

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