Barely a month after the Supreme Court decided to acquit the former socialist Minister of Employment Antonio Fernández and the former general director of Labor Juan Márquez following the rulings of the Constitutional Court in the case of the ERE, another high-ranking official may suffer the same fate according to of what was stated by the Junta of Andalusia, which exercises the private prosecution, in the last session of the trial against the former general director of Labor Daniel Alberto Rivera and the former union member of CCOO-A Juan Antonio Florido for alleged crimes of prevarication and embezzlement in the more than 9.76 million euros for income insurance policies of Andalusian workers of the Fertiberia company included in the employment regulation files (ERE) undertaken by such entity.
The Board’s lawyer has stated that, thanks to the new doctrine of the Supreme Court, in this case “the accusation against the accused cannot be maintained” because there are no “intruders” who collected early retirement without belonging to the Fertiberia staff, among other aspects, for which reason it has demanded the dismissal of the case regarding both. This does not mean, as he has specified, that the Andalusian administration renounces civil action, that is, the claim of the money released for these income insurance policies, as he has stressed.
During this last session, the prosecutor in the case, who initially demanded five years in prison, the same period of special disqualification and 12 years of absolute disqualification for Daniel Rivera and seven years in prison, the same period of special disqualification and 17 years of disqualification absolute for Florido, has raised its provisional conclusions to definitive ones. Of course, in the previous questions, the prosecutor had modified her conclusions, in the sense of reducing her request for a sentence for Florido to five years in prison, the same time of special disqualification and 12 years of absolute disqualification.
The prosecutor in the case, in her report, has considered that the “unquestionable participation” of both in the events prosecuted has been proven, insisting that for the ERE promoted in 2003 by Fertiberia to extinguish 166 jobs, although the company “does not requested any type of aid”, the General Directorate of Labor and Social Security of the Board and the then Innovation and Development Agency of Andalusia (IDEA), granted him socio-labor aid worth of more than 2.26 million euros in relation to 14 early retired former workers.
Finance the cost of severance pay
According to the Prosecutor’s Office, in total the Board released 9.76 million euros for income insurance policies for former workers affected by Fertiberia’s ERE, without the company requesting it. Specifically, always according to the Prosecutor’s Office, there were 1.95 million for 12 ERE workers in 2003 as a result of an alleged “illicit mechanics” supposedly orchestrated between them and Florido to, in view of the collective dismissal of that year, first request “the transfer of the center of work and, shortly after, obtain an incentivized leave and the inclusion of these workers as beneficiaries of retirement income insurance policies, through which the illicit payment was instrumentalized. of aid”; with which they ended up “charging an incentive for transfer and later another additional one for the incentivized leave.”
Another 317,735 euros appear in the indictment for the bonuses of the other two workers from the collective dismissal of 2003 and, in addition, 7.5 million euros for the income insurance policy of 159 workers of the ERE of 2009, “of the that there is no payment”; weighing in this the different payment orders of Daniel Alberto as general director of Labor since April 2010, to the IDEA agency, in relation to such aid granted.
“The purpose of these subsidies was to finance the cost of compensation for collective dismissal agreed between the company and the workers” and, according to the Prosecutor’s Office, they were “true aid to the company, with no economic analysis carried out by the Board” on their origin and that in its processing “the legal procedure was totally and absolutely dispensed with,” which “would result in full nullity,” despite the fact that there was also no “oversight” or monitoring of the money granted.
The prosecutor has thus pointed out the “active participation” of Florido, who in the trial has denied such a point, with the representative of the Public Ministry stating that at the hearing several witnesses working for the mediator Vitalia Vida stated that “in the face of difficulties due to the policies, it was necessary to “arrange a meeting with Florido.”
Furthermore, after in 2004 the then general director of Labor and Social Security of the Board, Francisco Javier Guerrero, died in 2020 and was convicted of prevarication and embezzlement in the sentence of the “specific procedure” for financing the ERE incentivized with regional funds and arbitrary aid to companies; formalize an initial document intended to “pay” 812,049 euros for the policy of the aforementioned 12 former Fertiberia workers; The prosecutor has warned that it is “unquestionable” that Daniel Alberto Rivera, who held said position since 2010, “formalized the payment orders” during his time to continue paying the commitments acquired by said department in relation to the Fertiberia workforce.
In his appearance, Rivera explained that when he landed in the General Directorate of Labor in 2010, it was María José Rofa, who was an advisor in said department, who “gave him the documents to sign.” In other words, she was “the technical person who set the amounts” of the payment orders that he signed.
“I assumed” that everything was correct
Rivera thus defended that when he signed the payment orders, like those prosecuted in this case, “he thought that the aid was guaranteed” and that he did not check the documentation of the income insurance policies that he paid for because he “assumed” that everything was correct. And according to his thesis, he had “no suspicion” that such procedures involved “irregularities or intruders”, a fact that he learned months later “through the press.”
But the prosecutor has not admitted this “argument that she was not aware” of the matter, considering that she was aware that this aid “lacked” legal coverage.
Daniel Rivera’s defense, for its part, has insisted that it has not been proven that he himself “had knowledge” of the irregularities, because when he landed in 2010 at the General Directorate of Labor he could not “know through vague science” the facts. subsidies whose commitments date back to “2004 and 2006”.
Furthermore, the lawyer has alleged that Rivera was complying with “the orders of the director and deputy director to continue paying the committed payments” in relation to these early retirements, demanding his acquittal.
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