A postman has been sentenced by the Provincial Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife to a year and a half in prison, although he will not go to jail, and has also been disqualified from carrying out that profession for four and a half years, for keeping a twenty shipments.
Likewise, he has been sentenced to pay almost 2,200 euros as a penalty and another 240 euros to the Post Office as civil liability, after assuming that he is responsible for a continued crime of infidelity in the custody of documents.
This convicted person will not go to prison as long as he avoids committing a crime for two years.
The case was processed by the second section of the Provincial Court of Santa Cruz de Tenerife, where it was considered that it required the constitution of a jury that was not convened because an agreement was reached.
The accused acknowledged that, around 6:30 a.m. on several days in June 2021, he took advantage of the moments in which he was alone unloading the boxes to seize about twenty letters and packages and then introduced them in the pants, so they did not reach their recipients in the municipality of Güímar.
Once the worker assumed his guilt and showed his agreement with the indictment, it was concluded that it was not necessary for the court to be constituted and that the defendant was guilty of the aforementioned crime.
Unfair dismissal despite conviction
Contradictorily, the social chamber of the Superior Court of Justice of the Canary Islands (TSJC) declared the dismissal inadmissible, considering that the evidence was “weak”, and obliged the state company to pay him just over 78,000 euros or reinstate him.
The defendant has chosen to collect compensation and rules out returning to work at the Post Office.
The postman was fired in 2021 because the entity considered that it had committed a “very serious” offense in its classification, distribution and unloading tasks by having free access to the cages in which the packages were located.
The company detected the continuous loss of shipments, so it opened an information file, especially after a certified letter containing two personal mobile phone cards disappeared.
Upon reviewing the security camera recording, it was detected that around 6:30 a.m. and for several consecutive days that month of June, similar events were repeated, sometimes depositing the shipment in a blind spot of the camera and picking it up later.
In other cases, according to the complaint, the worker carefully manipulated and inspected the contents of various materials, always at the same time, and then placed them in his pocket.
The facts were declared by the complainants as proven, attributable to the employee and constituting a continued disciplinary offense of a very serious nature.
It was considered that the worker had committed a violation of the confidentiality of correspondence, while he alleged that he was the recipient of the shipments, an argument that Correos did not consider “coherent.”
The entity found it “unlikely” that among the thousands of packages someone would try to find the ones addressed to him by removing the trays, in addition to the fact that his address is not located in the delivery area of this unit.
The person in charge of distribution alleged that after the suspension of employment and salary, the claims for missing shipments ceased, which had become frequent to the point that in a single day they received five.
The witness quantified the number of disappearances recorded in that period at 23, and which completely ceased shortly before the dismissal took place.
From there, the state company decided to file a complaint with the Civil Guard, opened a disciplinary file and proceeded with the dismissal while the criminal case was processed in parallel.
Despite all this, in the social sphere the TSJC concludes that the evidence was more of a hypothesis, it was only based for the most part on recordings that did not serve to prove the commission of a very serious offense or to declare the cessation of the relationship appropriate. labor.
In these instances, Correos is criticized for limiting itself to arguing that there have been customer complaints and a suspicious attitude on the part of the actor, which would not be sufficient basis for his dismissal to be declared appropriate.
