The Supreme Court agrees with Pérez de los Cobos and annuls his dismissal as head of the Madrid Civil Guard Command

The dismissal of Colonel Diego Pérez de los Cobos as head of the Civil Guard in Madrid was illegal.

The Supreme Court has upheld the appeal filed by Pérez de los Cobos against the ruling of the Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the National Court that had confirmed his dismissal, which occurred in May 2020. The decision adopted by the Third Chamber of the Supreme this Tuesday means annulling the sentence handed down on appeal by the Court and confirming the one adopted in the first instance by Judge Celestino Salgado, who revoked the dismissal.

The ruling that the Supreme Court has now confirmed ordered the Ministry of the Interior to reinstate the colonel as head of the Madrid Command and pay compensation for the money he had stopped receiving since his dismissal, so it is foreseeable that the ruling of the high court ratifies both impositions, say sources from the Supreme Court.

These sources warn, however, that the resolution is not yet fully drafted and it has not been decided in what terms these measures will be established.

Minutes after knowing the decision of the Supreme Court, Interior sources have indicated that they are waiting to know its full content to act accordingly, reports

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The ministry reiterates that "the substantive reasons that decided the dismissal persist and have been confirmed and consolidated with the elements known later."

The dismissal of Pérez de los Cobos in the midst of a state of alarm due to covid-19 raised a huge political uproar.

The relief came days after the dispatch, without prior knowledge of the Interior, of a report from the Civil Guard to the judge investigating the call for mass events such as the 8-M demonstration, Women's Day, shortly before to declare the state of alarm.

Grande-Marlaska initially attributed the dismissal of Pérez de los Cobos to a simple "change of teams", but in subsequent public appearances he linked her dismissal to a "loss of confidence".

Interior considered that the report sent to the court, which indicated Fernando Simón, director of Health Alerts, reflected "lack of political neutrality" on the part of Pérez de los Cobos.

The colonel himself took the case to court and the National Court agreed with him in the first instance, but the Contentious Chamber later revoked that decision with the unanimous vote of the five magistrates that made up the court.

The judges rejected that there had been a "deviation of power", as stated in the first ruling, and concluded that the Interior acted "in accordance with the regulations" when it decided to dismiss Pérez de los Cobos for loss of trust, "a quality that accompanies and mediates the appointment for said position and destiny

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The decision adopted by the Supreme Court, after a deliberation held this Tuesday, revokes this resolution.

The decision was not unanimous, say court sources, although there will be no individual votes.

The high court has only made known the meaning of its ruling, but the sentence with the arguments that have led it to adopt it, for which magistrate José Luis Requero is the rapporteur, will be known in a few days.

Legal sources indicate that the decision is based on jurisprudence already established in the Chamber according to which the cessation of discretionary public positions must be motivated.

According to the high court, for this justification, the loss of trust alleged by Marlaska is not enough, but the reasons that lead to this situation must be explained.

The ruling of the Court annulled by the Supreme Court went into these reasons, explaining that the loss of trust was due to "the 'non-information' of the 'development', not the content, of 'investigations and actions' carried out by the Guard Civil”, but the Supreme Court does not consider it sufficiently motivated, according to court sources.

The Supreme Court does not agree either that, as the Court pointed out, the jurisprudence establishes some "limits" to the judicial review of the dismissals -and of the appointments- in destinations of free appointment in Civil Guard positions and that the specific norm must be applied that governs these positions in the armed institute, and not the one referring to civil servants in general.

The jurisprudence used now is the same on which the Supreme Court based, in September 2022, its decision to endorse the decision of Grande-Marlaska, to dismiss, in August 2018, Colonel of the Civil Guard Manuel Sánchez Corbí as head of the Central Operative Unit (UCO), the main investigative unit of the Civil Guard in the fight against corruption and organized crime.

But in that case, the five magistrates of the Fourth Section of the Contentious-Administrative Chamber concluded that the dismissal had a "clear, sufficient and understandable motivation" for the loss of confidence that the Interior wielded to order it and, therefore, conformed to the law.

According to the Supreme Court, in the dismissal of Sánchez Corbí there was this motivation, which was justified "by loss of trust (...) by having sent an email on July 25, 2018 to the Judicial Police Headquarters and to all the Departments of the Unit Central Operating Unit ordering that any activity of the Central Operating Unit and its subordinate units, which are required to make expenses from the Reserved Expenditure Funds item, be temporarily suspended, without having received any type of instruction from their organic Commands or from the Judicial Authority or Public Prosecutor's Office, jeopardizing the success of police and judicial operations."