The Military Chamber of the Supreme Court has rejected the appeal of the State Attorney and has confirmed the annulment of a sanction applied in 2013 to a sergeant of the Civil Guard, who was stationed in Lanzarote and was commander of the post of San Bartolomé. The disciplinary sanction consisted of removing him from that position, considering him responsible for a serious offense, "consisting of serious disrespect towards subordinates in the performance of their duties."
The sanction was approved in a resolution of the general director of the Civil Guard in June 2013, but the affected party filed an appeal with the Central Military Court, which already ruled in his favor in the first instance. And not on the merits of the matter, but on the form. Specifically, the sentence maintained that the possible disciplinary responsibility had been "extinguished by prescription", since the file was completed outside the legally established period.
In reality, the resolution had been adopted a few days before that deadline expired, but the file is not closed until the decision is notified to the interested party. And in this case, the notification was delayed by more than a week because they could not locate the agent, who had requested a permit for personal matters during those days.
"Obstructionist maneuvers to cause the expiration"
In the appeal he filed against the judgment of first instance, the State attorney argued that "the validity of the notification cannot depend on the conduct of the notified subject, since maneuvers by the same obstructionist would suffice to prevent said notification from being made so that the expiration would occur". However, the Supreme Court has rejected his arguments.
The new ruling concludes that in order to validate the notification attempts that were made, certain requirements would have had to be met, which it considers were not met in this case, such as visiting the interested party's home at least twice on different occasions and leaving written record of this to prove it, without the unsuccessful telephone calls that were made being of any use.
Thus, it ratifies the judgment of the Central Military Court, which annulled the resolution and ordered the agent to be returned to the position he held before this sanction was applied. Furthermore, the judgment implies that all mention of this sanction must be removed from the agent's file. And he may also claim payment of any "expense" that has been caused by that loss of the position he held.
He called his subordinates "idiots and morons"
In the file that led to the application of this sanction, it is noted that for at least two years, the commander of the Civil Guard post in San Bartolomé and a corporal from the same barracks addressed their subordinates "with arrogance" and "treating them with contempt, referring to some of them as idiots and morons". Furthermore, they "frequently used loud tones of voice, including shouts and violent gestures, such as hitting the wall or the table, as well as unequivocally contemptuous and overbearing expressions and attitudes."
According to the sentence, both the commander and the corporal "came to state before third parties that the guards functioned better under pressure." Given these circumstances, up to 9 agents chose to request another assignment or a commission of services outside the unit or even caused various leaves for psychological reasons.
The sanctioning resolution of the Civil Guard recounted several episodes to exemplify the reported situation. In one of them, the commander called an agent to pick up his private car at the workshop, to which another sergeant, a colleague of that agent, expressed his disagreement. At the end of that same morning, the commander called the sergeant to his office and "reproached him for his lack of professionalism in various actions" that, according to the file, had taken place a month earlier, "without having said anything about it until then." "That call for attention was actually motivated by the sergeant's correct procedure, by preventing a civil guard from being distracted from service to carry out private matters", the resolution reproduced by the TS points out.
Shouts and punches on the table
It also refers to another clash between the same people, when the sergeant reported that an agent, specifically the first corporal against whom proceedings were also opened, had been absent from his post on a day of service, without answering the phone, having been seen later with his family. When he reported this situation, the commander told him to "leave" the corporal, "that he was doing well and that if he did anything against him he would start giving reports" against him.
To these episodes are added others with an agent. In this case it was the first corporal who, according to the resolution, came to address her "shouting at her, punching the table and telling her that she was useless, lazy and that she didn't want to work." And all because this agent had been changed a day off that she had already been granted, and for which she had already bought plane tickets, so she tried to resolve the situation.
Although all these events ended with a sanction, removing the commander from the position he had in the post of San Bartolomé, now the Supreme Court has annulled that resolution, because it understands that it was notified after the deadline, thus implying the expiration of the file.
