The mayor of Vidreres, Jordi Camps, denied in the Girona Court having favored an agent to place him at the head of the Local Police in an internal appointment process carried out between 2020 and 2021. The trial, held in the fourth section, was concluded this Thursday for sentencing after two days in which the accused testified and the process of conclusions and reports was carried out.
Camps faces an accusation for a continuous crime of administrative malfeasance. Also in the dock sat the head of the Local Police until 2020 and two officers investigated for their alleged participation in irregular appointments within the municipal force.
The relief in the leadership opened the conflict
The case dates back to August 2020, when the then head of the Local Police requested a service commission to go to another destination. The defendants maintained during the hearing that, to fill the position quickly, it was decided not to call a public competition and an internal selection was made among agents of the staff based on the submitted resumes.
The former head of the force stated that he reviewed that documentation together with the head of human resources and the then manager of the City Council. In total, he assured, six candidacies were received and the two agents finally chosen were, "by far", the best profiles.
On September 15, 2020, it issued a report in which it considered it urgent to enable those two agents to assume corporal functions. The Prosecutor's Office and the private prosecution maintain, however, that both did not meet the seniority requirements demanded.
Against that thesis, the then police chief denied irregularities and defended that the two years of seniority were required in a competitive examination, but not in some qualifications regulated by the service regulation of the Local Police. He even stated that none of the applicants met that requirement and added that the two selected accumulated about ten years of experience in the Mossos d'Esquadra.
The review of the decree and the suspension of the appointments
Jordi Camps signed a decree on August 18, 2020 to appoint the two agents as corporals of the Local Police. During his statement he explained that the partner of an unselected agent alerted him to possible irregularities in the procedure and that, from then on, he asked to review the decision.
"Everyone knows that I will never sign anything against the criteria of the technicians. That's why I asked the secretary to carry out an ex officio review of the decree" - Jordi Camps, mayor of Vidreres
The mayor justified that some reports had a date subsequent to the signing of the decrees due to the absence and subsequent leave of the municipal secretary during the pandemic. When that secretary warned that the decree was null and void by full right, Camps agreed to suspend its execution. According to what the defendants recounted, after that suspension the two agents stopped wearing the stripes.
A new decree to reorganize the body
Two days later, on October 8, 2020, the mayor signed another mayoral decree to reorganize the Local Police and appoint one of those agents as the new head of the force. That agent still holds the position today.
Camps maintained in the Court that, once the first decree was reviewed, the City Council requested advice from the Provincial Council of Girona and the Department of Interior. Based on those consultations, he pointed out, the council opted to apply the figure of the head agent instead of the habilitation of corporals.
"The only thing I did was to adhere to the recommendations of the municipal technical services and of the experts" - Jordi Camps, mayor of Vidreres
The four defendants denied having acted in common agreement or having designed a plan to benefit any of the candidates. They also denied the existence of a friendship between them, as maintained by the plaintiff police officer and other agents who testified during the trial. The mayor and the current head of the Local Police admitted that they know each other from being from the same town, but denied being part of the same group of friends or seeing each other outside of work.
"Everyone had the same opportunities" - Jordi Camps, mayor of Vidreres
The Prosecutor's Office maintains the disqualification penalties
The Prosecutor's Office and the private prosecution maintained their requests for conviction intact at the end of the hearing. For Jordi Camps they demand 14 years of disqualification from public employment or office. For the then inspector of the Local Police, 10 years of disqualification.
In the case of the two agents who benefited from the appointments, the public prosecutor attributes to them a continuous crime of accepting an illegal appointment and requests for each a fine of 3,600 euros and 3 years of suspension from public employment.
After the final reports of the accusations and of the defenses, exercised by Carles Monguilod and Míriam Campa, the provisional conclusions were elevated to definitive. The fourth section of the Audiencia de Girona must now resolve whether the decrees signed in Vidreres responded to an organizational need backed by technical criteria or if, on the contrary, they constituted an irregular appointment with criminal relevance.