A sentence of two years in prison along with the payment of 137,000 euros, to be settled at a rate of 300 euros per month, has been agreed upon during the oral proceedings at the Provincial Court of Tenerife for a persistent offence of falsifying a commercial document and another for aggravated fraud.
The ruling also includes a suspension of prison time and extinguishes the demand for 600,000 euros from the company, as it is no longer operational.
The Public Prosecutor’s Office, which sought a five-year custodial sentence and the restitution of misappropriated funds, consented to the reduction of both the prison term and the financial reimbursement.
Civil liabilities to the Public State Employment Service (SEPE) were assessed based on the amount derived from subtracting the incentives received for initiatives aimed at job creation, which were actually executed.
The company provided professional training courses to businesses and employers for their staff, leveraging bonuses in the form of relief on Social Security contributions.
The defendant informed the State Training Foundation for Employment that they conducted 340 training actions, of which 9 were cancelled.
The remainder were purportedly delivered remotely, involving 395 students over 14,330 hours, while those in a blended format included 213 students and 3,021 hours.
The total expenditure would have amounted to 162,000 euros for delivery services and 26,699 euros for organisation, cumulating to nearly 189,000 euros.
However, the invoices and their specified amounts did not reflect the activities actually performed or their associated costs, leading to unjustified inflated expenses.
In particular, the prosecution identified that the disclosed payments were either never made, did not compensate the instructors, lacked proper Social Security registration, or reported activities that were never conducted, significantly exceeding their actual costs.
Consequently, the total recorded expenditure for the training actions executed amounted to 5,400 euros.
