The Magistrate Carmen Suarezhead of the Barcelona Investigating Court 26, wants to interrogate as defendants Armand Calderonew general secretary of Mesures Penals de la Generalitat, and who was director of CatSalut in the hard phase of the pandemic, Adria Comellaboth for an alleged prevarication in the reassignment of posts to prison officials after the closure of the Modelo prison in Barcelona.
The court issued errands last October 5 Summoning the two high officials. It was in vain in the case of Calderó for being “unknown & rdquor; his address and the court does not know his DNI. Now Calderó has a new postal address: after the breakup of the Government, the new Executive of the Generalitat has replacement at the head of Mesures Penals, the highest operational command of Catalan prisons, position that he already held between February 2016 and July 2021. Lately he worked as coordinator of Public Security Systems in the Department of the Interior.
Comella, today manager of the Sant Pau Hospital in Barcelona, is cited because of his responsibility as Secretary General of the Department of Justice -position that he held as Calderó’s superior from January 2016 to the convulsive October 2017-, and not because of his time at the head of CatSalut.
Due to this health stage, Comella is charged in another ongoing court case, which, due to complaints from police unions, is being followed by the Barcelona Investigating Court 17, which is investigating why the vaccination against covid of the civil guards and national police was delayed stationed in Catalonia.
Complaint
This new lawsuit is one of the consequences of the definitive closure in June 2017 of the historic Model Prison of Barcelona, bureaucratically Center Penitenciari d’Homes, and more popularly the Model.
On August 22, Judge Suárez perceived evidence of a crime of administrative prevarication in what was reported in a complaint, which she admitted for processing, against Calderó and Comella. The complaint is also directed against the former director of Justice Services Angel Cortadelles for his lateral implication in the facts.
The complainant, the prison official Francesc Lópezis the current coordinator in Catalonia of the Acaip prison union –allied with the UGT, it forms the majority central in the prisons governed by the State-, but makes its complaint as harmed, although its union supports the complaint. In March 2017, when the Generalitat decided to initiate procedures for the closure of the Modelo, López was an official of that prison, and already with union activity, and began, like other efforts, to obtain a new assignment.
In that month of March, the Generalitat reached an Agreement with other unions on Effects on Personnel due to the model closure. The pact guaranteed that the officials would be relocated to similar positions in centers no more than 40 kilometers away from those of their choice, always with the final decision of Adrià Comella.
The preferences of the affected public workers were collected in the responses to an email from Justice Human Resourceswhich called for pointing out ten possible penitentiary establishments as the ones preferred by each person affected.
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According to the complaint, the ministry did not ask for preferences from López, as he did with the others, and directly assigned him a position at the Dones Penitentiary Center. The Generalitat did give other civil servants –unionists and non-unionists- the possibility of choosing their destination.
The complaint states that these facts were known by Comella directly, and that the reassignment of the job was made through an agreement with rival unions to Acaip, and with the execution of Armand Calderó. The complaint considers that Comella “deceitfully decided forget what their duties were and obligations & rdquor ;. He and Calderó, according to the complaint, “deviated from the current legislation to award the position, giving in to pressure that the unions exerted on them & rdquor ;.