The Supreme Court (SC) has ruled the dismissal of the head in Canary Islands of a company, Ingemont Tecnologías, S.A., which worked for institutions and entities in the islands where a budget deviation of 60% was detected and was sanctioned for breaches amounting to 130,000 euros.
The SC now concludes that the ex-boss breached the contractual good faith with the company after being there since June 2020 and being appointed in October as the top official in the Canary Islands.
The employee had powers to act on behalf of the company, especially in relations with public administrations such as the municipal boards of Gran Canaria and Tenerife, and municipalities like Ingenio and public institutions such as the Negrín Hospital.
The ex-boss was dismissed two years later citing disobedience to his superiors’ orders and that the figures he provided revealed a budget deviation of over 60% in the gross margin of operation whose management and supervision were under his responsibility.
“So the data provided did not correspond to reality, and what was envisaged as a positive activity from a business profit point of view, resulted in losses,” estimated at “several thousand euros,” details the ruling.
Regarding the Negrín Hospital, the Canarian Government imposed a fine of 61,000 euros at the end of 2022 for partial breach of the maintenance contract for the building and equipment of the hospital premises worth 61,000 euros, and various documents were also not submitted within the set deadline.
The Town Hall of the Villa de Ingenio reported a delay of over two months in the delivery of the restoration work of the historic centre of Carrizal, so they were going to be penalised by almost 17,000 euros.
The air conditioning of Casa Colón, the renovation of the agricultural market of San Lorenzo, works in Pozo Izquierdo, the local police station of Maspalomas, and buildings like Icasel and the Polyvalent of Cuevas Torres, both in Las Palmas de Gran Canaria were also affected.
In early 2022, the Cabildo de Gran Canaria imposed a fine of nearly 4,000 euros for another breach of the heating maintenance, and at the end of 2021, the Tenerife island authority communicated the opening of a file worth 48,000 euros for a serious irregularity.
Initially, the dismissal was considered unfair, but then the Social Court of the Canary Islands High Court of Justice (TSJC) changed it to fair, and now the SC has just ratified it.
The rulings indicate that he was the top official of the company in terms of representation and had broad management powers, and his responsibility included the management, control, and supervision of the contracted operations that in this case did not work.
The existence of economic deviations was also considered undeniable, so the figures provided by the employee, “were far from reality, generating a negative situation, quantified in thousands of euros.”
The courts stated that “this provision of erroneous data, not verified and capable of generating significant losses, constitutes a manifest breach of one of his main duties, which was to ensure the correctness and regularity of his functions.”
Therefore, the worker is attributed to “having negatively compromised the company’s assets, which blatantly violates the duties of good faith, loyalty, and fidelity.”
His authorship is also demonstrated by the fact that the company’s email in the Canary Islands was redirected to his, so he received all communications from the different contracts and was aware of penalties and deadline breaches.
