The mayor Joan Ribó joined yesterday in the case of the fraud suffered by the EMT in September 2019 to insist again on the responsibility of the management Celia Zafra and CaixaBank, a day after the ruling against the municipal company was known about the dismissal of the first one, considered inappropriate by the court.
“It’s a frequent topic in this type of court, there are five days to appeal and the situation is being analyzed about what the EMT and the City Council will do. It was to be expected, but it is too early to say,” said the first mayor about the decision to be taken. There are three options, and they are to appeal the ruling, readmit the employee (paying her for the year she has been out of the company) or assume the unfair dismissal by paying 199,000 euros. Ribó said he maintains his confidence in the Mobility Councillor and EMT president, Giuseppe Grezzi, despite the new setback. “What has happened if we analyze the Social Courts is not uncommon, quite the contrary.
“If Mrs. Zafra had not provided the information she gave and had not carried out those operations in which she was not authorized, the problem would not have arisen. In the same way, I have always said that if the corresponding bank had taken the measures that, for example, Bankia took, which refused to carry out this operation, it would not have happened either. Now, I am not the judge to make decisions,” he said about the criminal trial still pending for the robbery.
For her part, the spokesperson for the popular group in the Consistory, María José Catalá, criticised the fact that Ribó and his Mobility Councillor, Giuseppe Grezzi, “with the silence of their PSPV members used the fired worker as a scapegoat for the scam so as not to assume any political responsibility. Now, this house of cards that they set up to avoid political responsibility is falling apart”. The sentence, he argued, is “a new economic stick for the EMT, which has already taken on the hole of four million”. Catalá described the last year of the EMT as “horrible”. “They have had to plug the economic hole of the robbery; they have paid to extinguish the legal advice relationship with a law firm linked to Ribó’s brother-in-law; they have had to resort to a loan to pay the workers’ salaries with the guarantee of the City Council; and 20 buses were set on fire; to which we now add the almost 200,000 euros in compensation for the unfair dismissal”.
His counterpart in Citizens, Fernando Giner, stressed that the ruling “makes Grezzi politically responsible for the scam. The dismissal is one more victim of Ribó and Grezzi’s policies,” he said, recalling that they will demand political responsibility at the plenary session on the 25th. The Court of Auditors has summoned the dismissed management, a representative of the company and the Public Prosecutor’s Office to appear on 24 February, as a result of alleged irregularities in the disposal of public funds.
