The former president of the Junta de Andalucía, José Antonio Griñán, who has been sentenced to six years in prison and 15 years of disqualification for the case of the fraudulent ERE, has been a victim, when he was a Minister of the Treasury, of an inherited system that the Justice he considers that he did not brake despite having been alerted by the Intervention.
The Supreme Court (TS) has ratified the sentence issued in November 2019 by the Seville Court, which considered it proven that he had committed crimes of prevarication and embezzlement in the distribution of 680 million euros of public funds between 2000 and 2009 despite the fact that Griñán – who was Minister of Economy and Finance between 2004 and 2009 – assures that he was not in charge of the departure of the ERE or the ability to dispose of those funds.
When Judge Mercedes Alaya began to point to the Ministry directed by Griñán (Madrid, 1946), his then deputy minister, Carmen Martínez Aguayo – who later replaced him in the Ministry – publicly assumed that she was the one who received the Intervention reports that warned of irregularities in the procedure of the aid and that it was never warned of the undermining of public funds.
In a striking coffee convened in a meeting room of the Ministry of Finance, Martínez Aguayo confessed, before the astonished journalists, that she did not forward the reports of the Intervention to her then boss, former president José Antonio Griñán, and that she herself did not he read carefully.
The political dikes of defense did not prevent him from announcing in 2013 that he was leaving his post at the head of the Junta de Andalucía, which had ‘inherited’ from Manuel Chaves -also accused in the case of the ERE- and where he had already spent four years as head of the Executive of a community that did not know any other political color as ruler than that of the PSOE.
He had to appear before the Supreme Court when both he and Chaves were satisfied and he came to admit to journalists that he did not believe that “there was a great plan, but there was a great fraud” in the case of the ERE, an acknowledgment that has subsequently been translated into a sentence that condemns him for his management as a director.
Professor of Labor Law, his first position was that of Deputy Minister of Labor in Andalusia in 1982, although his political career was truly consolidated when he was appointed Minister of Health in the first Chaves cabinet, from where he made the leap to the central government as Minister Labor, to return again to Andalusian politics as head of Economy and then adding Finance.
Andalusian President from April 2009 to September 2013, Griñán agreed to the position after the resignation of Chavesand almost three years later the voters gave the victory to the PP for the first time, although without an absolute majority, so it continued to govern thanks to a pact with the IU.
He has reiterated before the Justice that he came to the Board in 2004, for which he has said that he has no relation to the implementation of the social and labor subsidy system for workers and companies in crisis, but the Justice has sentenced him to prison.
A few months ago he published the book ‘When nothing is expected’ and among the innumerable journalistic questions about the ERE case, he confessed that if the Supreme Court found him guilty, his life “would have ended.”