Magdalena and the holy innocents of the ERE

The Constitutional Court has been more severe and implacable with the ERE judges than with the politicians convicted of this fraud. That is the great novelty of the decision of the Constitutional Court when it has begun to resolve the appeals presentedbecause what has been known for many months is that he was going to agree, at least partially, with the leaders of the Andalusian Government who perpetrated that fraudulent system to use the hundreds of millions of euros in subsidies as they pleased.

The interpretation bias of the Constitutional Court is so relevant that, in fact, if it had applied the same legal logic and the same ethical rigor with those convicted of the EREI would not have had any hesitation to ratify the sentence. But between reprimanding, censuring and harshly criticizing the behavior of the socialist rulers of the Junta de Andalucía and doing so with the judges and magistrates who condemned them, he has opted for the latter. This means, as we will now detail, that the doubts and legal discrepancy that existed regarding some of the crimes that were committed in that scandal are not discussed, but to tip the balance towards one side, guilt, or the other, innocence, We must first answer whether, at any time, the Andalusian rulers acted without knowing, expressly, that they were breaking the law. They knew it, they acted conscientiously to nourish the clientele network of the PSOE of Andalusia, hegemonic for forty years in that community, and, now, many of them get away from all blame because, as has been said, the Constitutional Court has decided to be harsher and more demanding with the Supreme Court than with those convicted of the largest known fraud.

Among the ‘silly evidence’ that, on other occasions, we have pointed out here to try to clear up the doubt as to whether the top officials of the Andalusian Government knew that they were committing fraud with the awarding of these subsidies, the most compelling of all is that those same rulers acted correctly before and after breaking the law. Let’s look at the two convicted presidents, Manuel Chaves and José Antonio Griñán. If we add up the careers of both, we see that they were in the Andalusian Government from 1990 to 2013. Of those 23 years, subsidies from the Junta de Andalucía were granted legally in the first ten years and, subsequently, in the last three.

The ERE fraud period is right in the middle of these two stages of legality, making it clear that It was perfectly clear which procedure was legal and which was not.. The beginning of the fraud coincides with the first absolute majority of the PP in Madrid, in 2000, and the end of the illegality occurred in 2011, shortly after the famous general director of Labor, Javier Guerrero, now deceased, revealed to Judge Mercedes Alaya that there was an opaque ‘reptile fund’ to grant subsidies without following the requirements of transparency, publicity and free competition. That is to say, the fraud begins with the indisputable intention of ensuring socialist hegemony in that community, until then considered the ‘electoral breadbasket’ of the PSOE, and it ended as soon as the scandal was discovered and broke out. Let us add to all this that both Chaves and Griñán, especially the latter, were specialists in labor law and knew the current regulations perfectly, and that Magdalena Álvarez, the first of those exonerated by the Constitutional Court, is a Treasury inspector, with plenty of experience. knowledge about how the budget items that would be dedicated to the ‘reptile fund’ should appear in the budgets so that it would not be easy to locate them.

The ruling of the Constitutional Court, following the thesis of the vice president, Inmaculada Montalbán and the Prosecutor’s Office, maintains that the approval of a budget bill cannot be legally pursued due to the very characteristics of that text: it is a project , not a reality. They are right, without a doubt, because the one who approves the budgets, like all laws, is not the Government but the parliaments. For that reason, takes the side of those convicted of the ERE who appealed the ruling of the Supreme Court, and the Court of Seville, and makes it clear that the courts of Justice “can react against the legal form that results from those intentions, but the intention itself and its debate or discussion are immune in a democratic society to all jurisdictional control, especially if the debate takes place in a Parliament.” , privileged seat of public debate”. Based on this criterion, the Constitutional Court uses harshly against the magistrates, accuses them of having exceeded their limits, of having violated the separation of powers, and scolds them, so that they come to terms with the setbacks that will continue to come, that “the content of drafts and bills cannot be subject to control by any judicial body”.

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As said before, what cannot be ignored is that the legal debate on the application of some crimes in ERE fraud, such as this one of continued prevarication that is eliminated, has existed since the investigation phase itself, so Nothing can be reproached to the Constitutional Court in that sense. Except that that controversy was the one that was definitively resolved by the Supreme Court, which is the “jurisdictional body superior to all others” in our Rule of Law, as the Constitution says. For the Supreme Court, in view of the entire mountain of evidence and indications, and the perseverance of an illegal system of granting aid for a decade, what cannot be defended is that a Government is completely innocent of what it approves. and sends to Parliament, year after year, a project that contained massive deception, wrapped in the disguised paper of a dull heading: ‘item 31.L’.

The president of the Board himself, like many of his advisors, were also deputies elected at the polls, they were part of the socialist parliamentary group, with an absolute majority, and they had no doubt that the Andalusian Parliament would approve without difficulty the draft budget that they they presented. Only they knew the trap that was hidden. Isn’t the behavior of that Executive also a way of violating the separation of powers, due to the lack of respect for the Legislature? The “right to criminal legality” that the Constitutional Court recognizes for those convicted of the ERE is tainted, trampled, by the protagonists themselves from the moment they devised this system to, precisely, use the money without anyone being able to do so. detect or monitor. There are no innocent saints of the EREno, so that, at least, they spare us the insult of wanting to present ourselves now as victims unjustly persecuted by demons.