The Government openly questions the Supreme Court ruling on the case of fraudulent EREs based on criminal doctrine

Pilar Llop, Minister of Justice, in the control session of the Senate this Tuesday. JUANJO MARTIN (EFE)

The Government has slipped for the first time this Tuesday arguments of a legal nature that invite us to think about the possible pardon of José Antonio Griñán, sentenced to six years in prison for embezzlement in addition to prevarication in the sentence of the ERE, while in the PSOE there are opinions for all tastes on the electoral impact of the grace measure.

The party is divided between the leaders for whom granting the measure of grace before next year's elections - there will be regional and municipal elections in May and general elections at the end of 2023 - would further weigh down the options of revalidating territorial power and La Moncloa, and those who believe that the corruption case is amortized.

The feeling left by the confrontation this Tuesday between the Minister of Justice, Pilar Llop, and the general coordinator of the PP, Elías Bendodo,

in the control session of the Senate is that the Government has found more reasons for the pardon than the division between the magistrates who issued the ruling.

“In the PP we have no interest, believe me, in seeing former president Griñán go to jail.

We understand the suffering of both his family and the rest of those sentenced to prison.

But the sentences are to be carried out and the governments are far from here to make a free and capricious review of the judicial sentences, ”he explained.

of the PP, who until his leap to the national leadership of the PP was the advisor to the Presidency of the Andalusian president, Juan Manuel Moreno.

Llop not only stressed that the Supreme Court ruling "is not unanimous" and has two dissenting votes from two of the five magistrates.

The Minister of Justice stressed that it was a sentence "which is also being contested by criminal doctrine."

To reinforce his position, he cited an article by Gonzalo Quintero Olivares, a professor of Criminal Law highly appreciated among the magistrates of the Criminal Chamber of the Supreme Court according to legal sources, published in the

and other Grupo Joly newspapers in December 2019 under the title

.

The legal debate revolved around the crime of embezzlement since the Seville Court made the sentence public in November of that year.

“The creation of a system of budget transfers and alternative controls to the classic and much slower ones is tainted with criminality, and it is asserted that the purpose was not the 'essential streamlining' but the purpose of diverting;

that is, to embezzle.

But this legal extravagance collides with a reality not denied by the ruling: that the vast majority of the aid went to fair and correct destinations, and that only a minority package registered deviations, which shows that the diversion was in no way 'programmed' by the Administration”, emphasizes the text.

Although he was responding to another procedural moment, with the case of the ERE still in the Court of Seville,

Another noteworthy part of the professor's gallery, which according to legal sources could motivate the pardon of the former president of the Andalusian Government, former Minister of Finance and former president of the PSOE, among other positions, is the following: "It is repeated over and over again that the regional president and their directors or deputy directors, by reason of their position, had to know that something abnormal was happening, and for that they are responsible.

Resorting to inference is the complete opposite of the presence of proof, for the simple reason that inference is the 'solution' in the absence of proof.

Inference may play an important role in other fields, but in Criminal Law the system of guarantees does not allow assumptions”.

The reasons that Quintero Olivares collects in the gallery that the Minister of Justice gave as an example link with the private votes in the ERE sentence.

Judges Ana Ferrer and Susana Polo call the Supreme Court ruling a "leap into the void" and maintain that it is based on "inconclusive" evidence.

His conclusion is that the five accused of continued embezzlement, including Griñán, outside the Ministry of Employment - where the aid was distributed "without control" -, should have been acquitted of the prison sentence.

"None of the five defendants referred to intervened in these fraudulent acts of the final stretch of the execution of the budget, nor were they aware that they were being carried out by authorities and officials of the Ministry of Employment," they observed.

The conclusion of the three magistrates of the high court who reviewed the appeals presented by Griñán and his predecessor on the Board, Manuel Chaves —Chaves was sentenced to nine years of disqualification for prevarication, for which he is released from prison— is that the Board Andalusia created and maintained between 2000 and 2009 a system for granting socio-labour aid designed to avoid "all administrative control".

The result was that public money was disposed of “in a discretionary manner” and “outside all legality”.

The ERE fund was endowed with 680 million euros.

The Supreme Court ruling considers Chaves and Griñán to be the “determining” architects of the fraud.

for which he is released from prison - is that the Junta de Andalucía created and maintained between 2000 and 2009 a system for granting social and labor aid designed to avoid "all administrative control".

The result was that public money was disposed of “in a discretionary manner” and “outside all legality”.

The ERE fund was endowed with 680 million euros.

The Supreme Court ruling considers Chaves and Griñán to be the “determining” architects of the fraud.

for which he is released from prison - is that the Junta de Andalucía created and maintained between 2000 and 2009 a system for granting social and labor aid designed to avoid "all administrative control".

The result was that public money was disposed of “in a discretionary manner” and “outside all legality”.

The ERE fund was endowed with 680 million euros.

The Supreme Court ruling considers Chaves and Griñán to be the “determining” architects of the fraud.

Bendodo reminded Llop of the forcefulness of the ruling and the seriousness of the money defrauded.

“Randomly take any page of the 1,205 of the ERE ruling and you will see that it was the distribution of almost 700 million euros without a piece of paper, without anything.

Seven hundred million of the money from the unemployed in Andalusia for friends, cousins ​​and associates of the PSOE.

The sentence was clear: Andalusia was not socialist, socialism came doped to the elections with the ERE.

That is the reality, to continue winning elections.

Impunity and impudence reigned in the Andalusian PSOE, so much so that even the general director's driver bought cocaine with the money of the unemployed", asserted

Alberto Núñez Feijóo's

4,000 signatures

The PP is fully aware of how sensitive everything that concerns pardon is to the PSOE.

Even United We Can is against granting it, as its spokesman in Congress, Pablo Echenique, has made clear: “The prerogative of pardon should not be used for this type of thing.

We think that pardon is for other things, not for issues like this,” he said last week.

“The Government has been playing ambiguity, throwing balls out on this issue since the Supreme Court ruling was known almost two months ago.

Pedro Sánchez's ambiguity is calculated.

It is the same that followed in the case of those convicted by the

: first they denied the pardons, then they prepared the ground, they were making us the body and then they signed the pardons”, Bendodo insisted.

The PP proposes to prevent by law that the Government pardon members of its own party.

The pardon petition, an initiative of the Griñán family, has so far collected 4,000 signatures, among which, in addition to former presidents Felipe González and José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero and other former PSOE ministers, there are politicians from the PP, IU, Andalusians and nationalists.

Llop refuted Bendodo by reminding him of "the inventory of pardons that existed during the presidencies of Presidents Rajoy and Aznar."

"That, your honor, that, yes, it was an open bar," concluded the Minister of Justice.

Meanwhile, clemency has become a taboo for socialists.

The barons did not address it at Saturday's closed-door meeting of the Federal Policy Council in Zaragoza.

The territorial leaders of the PSOE hope that, when the time comes, the Constitutional Court annuls the sentence.

"It is a decision that the Government will take and always thinking about the general interest and justice", the Valencian president Ximo Puig dared to say when he arrived at the Council.

He was the only one who did.