The Court of Auditors condemns a former employee of the EMT to return the 4 million defrauded in a cyber scam

• EMT How four million euros from the Valencia bus company ended up in a Hong Kong bank

In September 2009, the municipal transport company of Valencia (

) was the victim of the so-called "CEO scam".

But, far from setting off all the alarms to be able to stop in time, the fraud was consummated with the theft of just over 4 million euros from the EMT, which ended up in two accounts in

.

The public money disappeared through eight bank transfers, without anyone noticing the cyber scam.

Now, the then director of Negotiated, Celia Zafra, will be the one who has to put the defrauded money out of her pocket.

This has been decided by the

in a sentence that is not final but that gives the reason to the

, which had accused Zafra of being responsible for the fraud and, therefore, fired her.

For the Court of Auditors, the former employee incurred "accounting responsibility" when she facilitated these transfers.

She did so, according to the ruling, "without informing her superiors, nor making any inquiries to those or colleagues or collaborators about the operation, the procedure or the destination of the funds, the person declared responsible provided information on the competent positions of the EMT to authorize and order payments by the company, their scanned DNI and documents in which their signatures appeared".

This is how the fraudulent payment orders could be prepared, which "the employee herself sent to the bank to make the transfers, without the authorization of her superiors and without following the established payment system."

The former directive had been sued before the accounting jurisdiction by the municipal company itself and by the Public Prosecutor's Office.

The Court of Auditors shares with the consistory that his behavior was "gravely negligent", because "he did not observe the minimum precautions that would correspond to the diligence canon qualified by the public nature of the managed funds and neither those of a good father of a family, in the terms of article 1,104 of the Civil Code".

Analyzing his conduct from these criteria, the judgment concludes in fact that "the criterion of the good father -or the good mother- of the family refers to that of a rational or careful administrator of one's own resources, who, when making a relevant decision , such as purchasing a durable consumer good, making a repair at home or even making a medical decision, consult neighbors, family or friends, look for someone who is an expert or has had recent experience in the matter or is informed In Internet".

"In a similar way, the conduct of an official, an official or any careful public employee can be characterized -the opposite of a seriously negligent-: prudence and respect for procedure are two of the fundamental traits that define the good professional work of an official ", adds the sentence.

For this reason, Zafra is sentenced to reimbursement of 4,054,971.98 euros, plus legal interest and procedural costs.

Against this ruling, issued in the first instance, an appeal can be appealed before the Justice Chamber of the Court of Auditors.

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