The Court of Seville has finally decided that it will be a Chamber composed of five magistrates who dictate the new sentences of the political piece of the case of the ERE against several former senior members of the Boardamong them, former presidents Manuel Chaves and José Antonio Griñánthus complying with what was adopted by the Constitutional Court after addressing the appeals for protection of those convicted in 2019.
Thus, as reported this Thursday by the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia (TSJA) in relation to the government agreement adopted, the Chamber will be made up of two of the three judges (one now retired) who handed down the original sentence: Pilar Llorente, who will also be in charge of the presentation, and Encarnación Gómez, currently assigned to the Alicante Court and on voluntary leave to care for a family member.
Regarding the latter and its exceptional situation, the Court recalls that the General Council of the Judiciary (CGPJ) has already responded to the TSJA and has determined that “the obligation remains for the magistrate to attend to form a Chamber for the issuance of the new sentence”, and this in accordance with article 194.2.3. of the Civil Procedure Law.
to them Three other judges from the First Section of the Seville Court will joinFrancisco de Asís Molina Crespo, Juan Jesús García Vélez and Patricia Fernández Franco, so there will be five in total who will dictate the new rulings, a decision that the Court has adopted taking into account different factors.
One of them, the TSJA explains in a statement, is to replace Juan Antonio Calle Peña, the retired judge who wrote the original sentence, so that what is contemplated in article 199.2 of the Civil Procedure Law can be followed, which “advises forming the Chamber with the necessary magistrates to form a majority“.
Likewise, the Court refers to article 197 of the Organic Law of the Judiciary, which “authorizes a greater number of magistrates to be called to form a Chamber when it is deemed necessary for the administration of justice. which in this procedure is undeniable due to its difficulty and legal significance“. Added to this is that “the matter to be deliberated, without prejudice to what the Chamber could understand, could be configured in the sense of having a strict and exclusive purpose of legally accommodating the factual basis already established to the situation and reasoning. arising from the ruling of the Constitutional Court”.
New bugs
It is worth remembering that the former senior officials convicted in the first instance by the Seville Court in the political piece of the ERE case appealed to the Supreme Court, which confirmed most of the convictions, and later to the Constitutional Court, which It did protect almost all of them, annulling the sentences of the Seville Court and ordering new ones to be issued with a reduced number of crimes to take into account.
In the case of Griñán, who was initially sentenced to six years in prison and 15 years of disqualification for crimes of embezzlement and prevarication (although his sentence was suspended for a period of five years due to the cancer he suffers from), The TC forgave the embezzlement, which is what implies a prison sentence. Both in his case and in that of Chaves, sentenced only for prevarication to nine years of disqualification, the Constitutional Court has limited the sentencing events to a few budget modifications.
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