Amaia del Campo, mayor of Barakaldo, will testify next Friday in the local courts as being investigated in a procedure for workplace harassment. The case of the former lawyers of the City Council, which has been involved in litigation since 2018 in the contentious-administrative and in the Social Courts, now begins criminal proceedings. The procedure is at a preliminary stage, in the investigation phase, after a complaint from the Prosecutor’s Office, but at the moment it is taking the mayor of the PNV to the courts in the open confrontation she maintains with those who were lawyers of the council, and that Del Campo ‘inherited’ from the stage of socialist government in the council upon his arrival to the mayor’s office in 2015. These are José María de Pablos and María Dívar, who are the private prosecutors in this procedure.
Sources from the parties have confirmed that together with the mayor they will testify in the Investigative Court number 3 of Barakaldo as investigated – former defendants – other charges and former charges of the City Council: Gorka Zubiaurre, delegate councilor of Alaldía, Iratxe Forces, councilor and former head of Resources Humans, Humberto Estébanez, former municipal general secretary, Yolanda Fika, former councilor for Citizen Security, the doctor and responsible for Occupational Health, Fernando Mier, and Sonia Samaniego, head of personnel.
The accusations they face range from crimes against moral integrity, against workers’ rights, prevarication or falsification of public documents. The complainant lawyers accuse the mayor and her team of “degrading treatment” and alleged manipulation of mayoral decrees.
The mayor’s open conflict with the workers started in 2018. The PNV met with this legal team, made up of José María Pablos, as the main lawyer, and María Dívar, interim lawyer, upon their arrival at the council after winning the elections in 2015. , after unseating the previous socialist Government for the first time in 32 years. Three years later, the confrontations between the mayor and the lawyers began, which have ended in court, with the majority of the sentences ruled so far in favor of the lawyers – there are still cases to be ruled on.
The conflicts began when María Dívar requested that her position in the RPT (Job List) be equated with that of her colleague, José María Pablos, considering that he performed the same functions. Although the Plenary of the City Council was overwhelmingly in her favor, with the vote of the PSE-EE, EH Bildu and Irabazi, the brand of the left at that time, the worker’s appeal was finally dismissed. After several claims by María Dívar to recognize certain salary supplements that the Mayor’s Office rejected by decree, one of the moments of greatest tension between the Mayor’s Office and the legal services occurred in 2019 when Pablos and Dívar prepared a report on the judicial defense in the contentious-administrative appeal filed by the Miranda Foundation against a motion approved by the Municipal Plenary in September 2018. In that report, the lawyers recommended revoking that plenary agreement, since they considered that they did not have the powers to approve it and the established legal procedure had not been followed. The mayor decided to go ahead and defend the motion in court, which she ultimately lost.
From that moment on, the Mayor’s Office recorded in a decree dated March 2019 that the lawyers followed the procedural practice of requesting suspensions of procedures on their own when they considered that they did not comply with the law without counting on the Mayor’s Office or the area concerned, and considering that there was a loss of trust, Amaia del Campo had a series of instructions to force them to communicate in advance all decisions in the procedural field. This decree, restricting the functions of lawyers, was later declared contrary to law and void by the courts after admitting the contentious-administrative appeal presented by María Dívar and José Mará Pablos.
A few months later, in October 2019, the mayor approved starting the “removal” procedure – deprivation of position or employment – of José Mari Pablos from his job, alleging “lack of trust”, on the one hand, due to the actions before the court without counting on the municipal bodies, and, on the other, for the support to the interim official in her salary claims. In January 2020, Amaia del Campo signed a decree to dismiss the head of the legal department’s service, José María Pablos, and demoted him to the position of legal advisor. The next day, also by decree, he fired the person who was then a legal advisor because, as she was an interim official, her position disappeared when it was occupied by the until then head of the legal department. Another decree that a year later was annulled by the judge and condemned the City Council to restore them to their positions, paying them what they have stopped receiving during that time, including Social Security. The TSJPV subsequently dismissed the City Council’s appeal against this ruling.
Subsequently, the court also upheld the contentious-administrative appeal filed by María Dívar, and recognized her right to the salary supplements she claimed.
The tension reached its maximum level when in 2022 the forced retirement of the lawyer chief of service was approved at 66 years and two months of age, despite the fact that in April of the previous year he had been authorized to extend his activity until he was 70 years old. A decision that was also overturned by the courts.
In parallel with the conflict with the lawyers, and having lost ‘trust’ in the legal team, the Mayor’s Office has hired the services of external law firms that have been highly criticized by the opposition and questioned by the City Council’s own auditor. Those who have been her government partners in the previous legislature and are in the present one, the PSE-EE, have also positioned themselves against the mayor throughout the process against the lawyers, who have openly criticized the “way of the cross” to which has been subjected to these workers.
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