Editor’s note: This article was first published in September 2011. It is a news item, and the investigation, the €1 million in subsidies and the more than 200 people affected describe the state of the case at that time.
A new episode in a long series of employment fraud cases. This time it involves hiring people with disabilities in order to collect the corresponding public subsidies.
The Junta de Andalucía (Andalusia’s regional government) may have handed one million euros to a telemarketing company whose method and fraud scheme were as simple as this: hire people with disabilities, collect the subsidies established by the regional administration and, before the “workers'” probationary period was over, get rid of them, in some cases without even paying them their pro-rated wages.
The company, based in Jaén and operating in several Andalusian provinces, including Granada and Málaga, even went as far as hiring people with hearing impairments (deaf people) for telemarketing jobs (answering the phone and selling over the phone).
The possibility is being examined that someone inside the Junta de Andalucía itself knew about the fraud and still processed and approved the subsidies, since the hiring scheme was far too… “obvious” for a company that had barely any commercial activity and yet received a total of one million euros in subsidies. So far, more than 200 people have been affected by this fraud, over 90% of them people with disabilities.
When we talk here about business owners who aren’t worth “a hill of beans”, this is the kind of people we mean.
Featured image: Diego Delso, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
