Spain’s constitutional court is now overturning jail sentences facing socialist politicians convicted of embezzling public money. The case involves at least €680 million, misappropriated over the course of nine years ending in 2009—making it one of the largest corruption cases in Spanish history, adding another huge scandal to the list of socialist misdeeds.
The case involves two former presidents of the Andalucia region, Manuel Chaves and José Antonio Griñán; four former advisors and two former vice councilors, such as Carmen Martínez Aguayo, as well as 15 other senior officials. Called the ‘Caso ERE,’ it saw misuse of funds earmarked for rescuing troubled businesses in the region. However, according to the sentences delivered by both the regional high court and the country’s Supreme Court, the funds lacked proper controls, objective criteria, and transparency, being granted instead in exchange for all kinds of favors.
Those involved have either been sentenced to prison time or banned from holding public office, or both. The crimes they were convicted of included both abuse of power—for arbitrarily granting the concessions—and embezzlement of public funds.
However, the convicts have appealed to Spain’s constitutional court, now stacked with seven out of 11 left-leaning judges, some of them appointed by prime minister Pedro Sánchez and with close links to the socialist party. In June, the court exonerated the first case of the bunch by overturning the conviction of Magdalena Álvarez, a former regional advisor, for abuse of power.
The ruling in the first case will serve as precedent for the appeals to follow. It employed the unprecedented legal theory that abuse of power could not be committed within the approval of the government budget, “even if the rule included fraudulent items masked as aid for companies in crisis, because this is not an administrative act.”
Most scandalous of all is the involvement of judge Inmaculada Montalbán Huertas, vice president of the constitutional court and a Sánchez appointee. She was decorated with the Medal of Andalusia in 2012 by José Antonio Griñán, former president of Andalusia and one of the convicts in the case. El Debate sources have explained that even simply for “aesthetic reasons” she should have recused herself from participating in the ruling because of her obvious close link to one of the appellants. Instead, she is the rapporteur in the case.
The court will also start deliberating on the embezzlement conviction of Carmen Martínez Aguayo, who led the tax administration for Andalusia from 2004 to 2009. The draft eliminates her prison sentence of six years, El Debate reports.
According to El Debate, the anticipated ruling diverges novelly from its predecessors. First, the draft argues that the necessary guilt and the sufficient responsibility can only apply to those officials who had at the time a direct link to the Employment Department, which was ultimately responsible for distributing the payments.
The department was itself the mechanism for the distribution of the funds. Budget transfers were made to the employment agency, which, in practice, was the body in charge of distributing payments—without proper accountability.
Judges signing on to the minority opinion denounced the majority opinion in both its content and “tone” as an “unnecessary” attempt at “disqualifying” the Supreme Court decision. They go on to say that the majority opinion “weakens the effective prosecution of crimes of institutionalized corruption committed by the Government or its members” and “devastates the limits of constitutional jurisdiction, by breaking into the scope reserved for ordinary jurisdiction and supplant the function of the Supreme Court as the maximum interpreter of the law.”
