The Supreme Court defends that the decision to fire Colonel Diego Pérez de los Cobos of the Civil Guard for not giving the Ministry of the Interior information about a judicial investigation was outside the law. According to the sentence, “government interference was not admissible, especially if the magistrate had ordered absolute secrecy and that only she be informed.”
The Contentious-Administrative Chamber of the high court refers to the investigation that was opened in 2020 into the Government delegate in Madrid for allowing the demonstration for Women’s Day on March 8 when the covid infections were already out of control, case that was finally archived.
In this matter, the agents dependent on the Madrid Command of the Civil Guard, whose maximum person in charge was Pérez de los Cobos, assumed the investigation work as judicial police.
The general director of the armed institute at that time, María Gámez, and the Minister of the Interior, Fernando Grande-Marlaska, reproached the latter for not previously informing of the existence of the report that was delivered to the instructor in which an alleged criminal responsibility was pointed out. by Jose Manuel Franco.
That meant the immediate dismissal of Pérez de los Cobos, a decision that has now been reproached by the Supreme Court. “It is not possible to dismiss someone who was not part of that Unit and pretext for it ‘not reporting the development of investigations and actions of the Civil Guard in the operational framework and of the Judicial Police for information purposes,'” the sentence states.
Likewise, the court qualifies Grande-Marlaska’s order as “confusing” as well as “redundant, because if the appellant was expected to report, it is obvious that it was for ‘knowledge purposes’, that is, to find out something that was unknown and that appeared in the press.
For the magistrates, the cause invoked by the Interior to dismiss him from his post “is unrelated to an unexpected inadequacy for the position, as proven by the fact that the initiative for dismissal did not come from the commanders and does not respond to a negative assessment of professionalism and suitability by Perez de los Cobos.
This sentence implies that the Ministry of the Interior has a maximum period of two months to restore Pérez de los Cobos as head of the Madrid Command, in addition to paying him the amount he has stopped receiving for the position.
