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  • Corruption. Next Tuesday, the ruling of the main piece of the ERE, one of the biggest corruption cases in the country, in which 21 former high-ranking officials of the Board were tried, including former presidents Manuel Chaves and José

They made the conscious decision of not wanting to see more ». With this blunt phrase, the Anticorruption Prosecutor's Office summed up in its final report the actions of the senior officials of the Junta de Andalucía - among them, two former presidents - in the face of a fraud that allowed 855 million euros to be diverted from their objective that should have served to reactivate companies in crisis and help their workers. This Tuesday, the court of the First Chamber of the Court of Seville will announce the judgment of the trial of the main piece of the ERE, which sat on the bench for a whole year Manuel Chaves , José Antonio Griñán and other 20 former high positions of several socialist governments and, with them, a whole system that for a decade made clientelism a very effective tool to maintain "social peace" and, in passing, enrich a handful of intermediaries who took advantage of the lack Absolute controls in the management of public money.

After a year of silent work, the ruling on the most important corruption case linked to a socialist government in Spain will be announced at a particularly delicate time for the PSOE and for the acting president, Pedro Sánchez , immersed in the complicated negotiation to carry out the investiture. A late delay prevented precisely that the Spaniards (and, especially, the Andalusians) went to vote on November 10 knowing the ruling of the Audience of Seville. The magistrate presiding over the court, Juan Antonio Calle , asked at the end of October, when it was already expected that he would make public the sentence from one day to another, a last extension of 15 days to conclude the technical issues of a resolution that will have more than 1,700 folios. This circumstance, which has allowed the PSOE to go to the polls without the added pressure of virtual sentences, has raised many suspicions, to the point that the Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia (TSJA) had to step out of them the last week denying that there had been a "deliberate" delay.

When on December 17, 2018, the president of the court pronounced the “seen for sentencing”, he put an end to a long process that had started a year and four days earlier and was held in 152 intense sessions, during which the three magistrates ( Pilar Llorente and Encarnación Gómez , in addition to Juan Antonio Calle) have assessed the degree of participation that each of the defendants would have had in the manufacture and management of an administrative tool, known as a specific procedure, which allowed to avoid the rigors of the Law on Subsidies in the arbitrary distribution of aid to companies and the unemployed, many of them intruders who had never worked in those companies.

Because that is what has been judged in this piece of the ERE: If the 22 defendants intervened in the maneuvers that allowed to deactivate the filters and alarms to give free access to the capricious distribution of public aid, squandering hundreds of millions of euros that should have contributed to reducing the labor gap in Andalusia .

Parties and cocaine

On the contrary, nothing has been seen in this process about some of the most humorous chapters of how many make up the story of the ERE case, such as the use of aid to pay for parties and buy cocaine by one of those investigated or payment of substantial commissions. Those episodes of the investigation will be judged in successive trials in the coming months and years. The investigating judge María Núñez Bolaños , who took the witness of Mercedes Alaya when she moved to the Audience of Seville, decided to cut the case and to split this main piece of the investigation of more than 200 aids, with which the sentence will be limited to establish the responsibilities on the part of the high positions in the creation of the cheating procedure, but not in the concrete actions. That is why they were not on this bench or the one known as the driver of the coca or the alleged achiever and former trade unionist Juan Lanzas , indispensable characters in the script of this plot.

Yes, former Minister Magdalena Álvarez has appeared before the judge, for being a former Minister of Economy and Finance. At the time of his imputation he was vice president of the European Investment Bank, a position he had to resign in June 2014. There have been three, therefore, former socialist ministers who have appeared as defendants, since Chaves and Griñán also were.

The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor asks for 6 years in jail and 30 years of disqualification for José Antonio Griñán, charged in the case for his performance in his position as Minister of Economy and Finance between 2004 and 2009 and, since April 2009, as president of board. He charges the continued crimes of embezzlement and prevarication. For Manuel Chaves, the Public Ministry asks for 10 years of disqualification for a continuing crime of prevarication.

Together with them, five other former counselors have sat on the banks of the accused of the Audiencia of Seville: Gaspar Zarrías , José Antonio Viera , Antonio Fernández , Francisco Vallejo , Carmen Martínez Aguayo and the former General Director of Labor Javier Guerrero , who signed of his handwriting all the aid despite lacking competencies for it and that he baptized as reptile fund the 31L heading of the budgets of the Junta de Andalucía from which the funds that were later distributed according to personal interests or supporters of the Andalusian Government.

The former Deputy Minister of Innovation Jesús R. Román , the former General Director of Labor Juan Márquez , the former Deputy Employment Counselor Agustín Barberá or the former Deputy Minister of Finance José Salgueiro are also accused. In total, 21 (there were 22, but former Treasury Secretary Antonio Estepa was exculpated).

The case of the ERE is therefore not exhausted with this sentence, since the cutting of the case will force as many trials as aid are being investigated and that could be more than 200 according to the calculations of the defenses.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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  • PSOE
  • Manuel Chaves
  • José Antonio Griñán
  • Andalusia
  • ERE case

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