Javier Guerrero, the main convict of the 'ERE case', dies

Francisco Javier Guerrero, upon his arrival at the Seville Court in an image from November 2019.Alejandro Ruesga

Javier Guerrero, the main person convicted of the macrocause of the ERE and ultimately responsible for the distribution of 647 million public funds in Andalusia, died this Sunday at his home in Seville.

The former Director of Labor of the Andalusian Board, 63, died at dawn of a heart attack, pending confirmation after the autopsy.

Guerrero, sentenced to 13 years in prison for two reasons, was free after appealing both sentences to the Supreme Court.

Charismatic, tender and lively, Guerrero misconceived the judicial ordeal that his unbridled life led to as responsible for a millionaire fund for companies in crisis that the Junta de Andalucía put in his hands.

His stage as director general of the Andalusian Government (1999-2008) has been elucidated in the courts in recent years, and the severe ruling made a dent in his health, which yesterday said enough.

“Javier had abandoned himself and in the last two years he was going very downhill.

It was not good of morals ”, has pointed a friend who requests anonymity.

Guerrero, the most mediatic and main implicated in the macrocause of fraudulent ERE, which has had more than 500 defendants, began with respiratory problems at dawn this Sunday and died shortly after.

The health services, which came after the call of his daughter and his wife, could only certify the death and transfer the body to the Institute of Legal Medicine and Forensic Sciences in Seville, where an autopsy was performed.

“It was totally unexpected.

He was well and encouraged because last week he had been informed that they were exempting him from three procedures that were separate pieces of the main case of the ERE and we had presented two appeals for cassation, ”said his lawyer Rafael Ramírez-García del Junco.

His death joins that of other relevant defendants in the ERE, such as businessmen José María Ruiz-Mateos and José Enrique Rosendo, most of them natural deaths.

The exalted position of the Andalusian Junta, one of the best-known faces of the biggest corruption scandal in the community, was Director General of Labor during the Governments of Manuel Chaves and José Antonio Griñán.

Both Guerrero and the former Minister of Employment Antonio Fernández were sentenced to 7 years and 11 months in prison for continued prevarication and embezzlement in the political piece of the ERE, the highest penalties imposed by the Seville Court in 2019.

At the same time, Guerrero had been sentenced to five years, in relation to the payments made by the Employment Department that hired 44 workers from the Umax computer company, hired verbally and with whom he had “ties of neighbor and friendship”. according to the judges.

Guerrero was also the socialist mayor of his town El Pedroso (Seville) from 1999 to 2008, and for the

was in preventive detention for eight months in 2012 and another two and a half months in 2013. He was currently free, after appealing both judgments before the Supreme Court, awaiting the decision of the high court, which is studying the sentence that convicted 19 former senior officials responsible for the employment policy of Andalusian socialism.

Guerrero managed at his whim a fund of 647 million that in a first police statement he called a "reptile fund", which suggested the use of illegal commissions to buy wills.

The expression curdled and flooded headlines, as well as others to define the beneficiaries of the early retirement policies: "Little children in need of help", many of them friends, acquaintances, trade unionists and people related to the socialist party.

In his years of greatest debauchery, he sometimes dispatched his public aid in a well-known cocktail bar in Seville.

The judicial declaration of his ex-driver, Juan Francisco Trujillo, in 2012 multiplied the scandal, when he confessed that he and his boss spent 900,000 euros on “cocaine, parties and drinks” from two public subsidies that Guerrero granted him.

The cocktail of ill health, two convictions and dozens of pending trials, exploded this Sunday in a tragic way.

Pending dozens of processes

The harsh ruling of the political piece of the

is in the hands of the Supreme Court, which must ratify or modify the sentences of Guerrero, former Andalusian presidents Manuel Chaves and José Antonio Griñán and 16 other former officials of the Board.

But regardless of his more media process, Guerrero endured the slab of dozens of processes under investigation that could lead to more years in prison.

The former high-ranking official recently sat on the bench for the

one of the 150 pieces of the macrocause of the ERE, pending whether the Seville Court exempted him from the process for his conviction in the main piece.