• Chronology of the ERE case: the biggest cause of open corruption in Spain
  • Judgment: ERE complicate negotiations with the PSOE
  • Case ERE. Thus (no) the governments of Griñán and Susana Díaz collaborated with the judicial investigation
  • Judgment: The least neat face of the ERE case: Cocaine, recordings and "money to roast a cow"

Did the Board design a procedure to deactivate controls and allow aid opacity? Were the administrative tools that were used to distribute and pay the funds to companies in crisis were lawful? Was the Andalusian Parliament systematically deceived by the Socialist governments of the Junta? Can a law passed by the Autonomous Chamber be illegal? The judgment of the ERE case that will be announced on Tuesday the First Section of the Sevill Hearing will clear some legal doubts repeated during the 152 sessions of the trial and will mark the line to be followed in future pending prosecutions, because it is worth not forgetting that this piece that It is now resolved is only one (although the main one) of the more than 200 that are derived from the ERE macrocause.

Dead angle

The socialist governments designed what has been known as a specific procedure to process the aid distributed between companies in crisis and workers. The document that gave the green light to the system was signed by former advisors José Antonio Viera and Antonio Fernández. The thesis of the Prosecutor's Office is that it was expressly designed to circumvent the controls of the Subsidies Law and facilitate arbitrariness. But there was also an administrative tool that has been called into question: these are the financing transfers received by the IDEA agency , which was the entity through which the money was sent to its recipients.

In the words of one of the auditors mentioned as a witness, Rocío Marcos, the use of this formula left "out of control" more than 800 million euros already distributed without the ordinary filters. A "blind spot" was created that prevented the intervention from tracking the funds. The figure would be legal but was used improperly in a systematic way despite the fact that the auditors warned of the irregularity.

Ignored alerts

Why did those responsible do nothing if the Board auditors issued successive alert reports? Several high charges accused deny having received those files where they warned of the impossibility of knowing if the aid was being awarded correctly. One of the reports was addressed to José Antonio Griñán, then an advisor to the Treasury, but he denies having received it. The court must define who knew the extent of the irregularities and who avoided their obligation to stop them.

The reptile bottom

The story of the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office on the functioning of the Ministry of Employment in the decade under investigation and other members of the Andalusian Government (by action or omission) points to the existence of a complex system to avoid control over the money that came out of the items 31L - known as 'reptile fund' - and 22 E. And underlines how the procedure was improved to avoid knowing the amounts distributed in each case or so that, in the "meager" processing of subsidies, did not participate no official of the administration of the Junta de Andalucía , but only «external staff».

The Prosecutor's Office also considers that, "despite being aware of the inappropriateness of the described granting of public funds", after being warned of the irregularities in several reports of the intervention, the defendants, "having powers to do so, did not initiate any procedure that allowed their due return to the Junta de Andalucía ».

From this irregular procedure, protected and fed by public funds, year by year, through fraudulent budgetary tools, 77 arbitrarily selected companies benefited ; workers were allowed to subscribe to the policies despite never having worked in those companies; and the mediating agents were paid "at least 66 million euros above market prices."

Parliament's role

The role of Parliament has also been questioned. The defenses argue that the use of financing transfers was endorsed every year by the Chamber, which approves the Budget Law that detailed the use of this tool, although in a generic way. The accusations maintain that the Parliament was deceived because it is unlikely that the deputies will enter with such technical detail in the documentation that accompanies the Budget Law. And the defenses defend that if the transfers were approved by Parliament, it is not conceivable that a law is illegal .

So many judgments as separate pieces

The splitting of the case, which was the first decision taken by Judge María Núñez Bolaños after replacing Mercedes Alaya in Court of Instruction No. 6 in Seville, has allowed the highest-level defendants in the ranks of the Junta de Andalucía not They are portrayed on the same bench as the rest of those investigated. Judge Alaya always defended the cause as an integral whole that was impossible to break up, since the modus operandi of the Board was always the same. However, it should also be remembered that it was the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office that claimed the magistrate over and over again to divide the process so that the instruction would not be eternalized and that the more advanced lines of work would be closed.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

Know more

  • José Antonio Griñán
  • ERE case
  • Corruption
  • Andalusia
  • Seville
  • Manuel Chaves
  • Mercedes Alaya

Case of the EREAsí (no) the government of Griñán and that of Susana Díaz collaborated with the judicial investigation of the ERE

CourtsThe new ERE judge concludes in five months of the corruption macrocause

Public funds The Board recovers 10 years later the 13.8 million that Manuel Chaves gave to his daughter's company