The supreme court has substantially confirmed the judgment of the Seville Court of November 2019, which condemned 19 senior PSOE officials in the case of the you are, the irregular use of 680 million euros to cover “fraudulent or unnecessary” employment regulation files (ere) and to help companies with arbitrary subsidies, with the aim of achieving “social peace”. The most important sentence is that of the former president of the Board, Jose Antonio Grinansix years in prison for embezzlement of public funds and prevaricationfollowed by that of the former president Manuel Chavez, nine years of disqualification for prevarication. All the sentences are very harsh, since eight other senior officials, four of them former directors, they will have to go to jail. They only have recourse to the Constitutional Court (TC), which does not usually suspend entry into prison for sentences of more than five years.
As we already wrote when the 2019 ruling came out, the account of the proven facts justifies the harshness of the sentences because, although there was no profit motive, a whole “fraudulent system” of distribution of public money without control has been judged, with suspicions of cronyism and patronage, established in the year 2000 when the PSOE had been in power for decades in Andalusia, which It would still last until the replacement in 2018 by the Government of the PP and Ciudadanos, supported by Vox. Ta long exercise of power always entails episodes of corruption. It is significant that the confirmation of the sentence of the you are coincides with the taking of possession of a Government of the PP with an absolute majority, a political fact that comes to ratify the end of an era marked by the judicial decision and that recalls the weight that this case of corruption had in the collapse of the PSOE in Andalusia.
Related news
The Supreme Court ruling, however, has been adopted for the minimum, three magistrates in favor and two against, especially for the evaluation of the crime of embezzlement, which is the one that carries prison. Two magistrates considered progressive will sign a dissenting opinion in which they defend the acquittal of Griñán and three other exalted charges of the crime of embezzlement. Although the argument is not yet known, the defense argued that the money diverted to purposes other than what was budgeted went to other destinations that also admitted public money, so it would not have been embezzled.
In any case, this matter has gone through all the judicial instances (in the absence of the TC) and marks an exemplary bar that has not been reflected in other sentences. The parties always use corruption as a throwing weapon when it affects their adversaries. Upon learning of the sentence, the president of the PP, Alberto Núñez Feijóo, rushed to ask the PSOE to purge responsibilities in the party. However, both Chaves and Griñán retired from political life a long time ago and the Socialists paid for their political responsibilities with the loss of power four years ago.