The Supreme Court finds that deception with job offers is serious fraud because work is a basic necessity of life

He Supreme Court confirmed the sentence of six and a half years in prison that the Provincial Court in Álava imposed on an entrepreneur as a perpetrator of a criminal offense against labor rights and fraud because he pretended to have founded a transport cooperative in 2010, amid crises and offers employment drivers who needed it and those who did not offer minimum working conditions at the time.

Namely, according to the claims of the high court, the convict contacted numerous people who were unemployed and looking for work, and after that first contact, he arranged an interview with them in which he assured them that they could become part of the cooperative as partners. They then verbally agreed on a salary or an advance payment of around 1,800 euros per month, from which the social security contributions that the company would pay would be deducted. The workers only signed the application for establishing a cooperative and the application for registration in the self-employment regime, many of them were not aware that they were not employed by others. The workers accepted all these conditions because of their economic need because they were unemployed.

All this affected the working conditions of the workers, because the company did not pay social security contributions, even though it had committed to do so. In addition, the working conditions were not agreed, because there was no compensation or the salary was different from what was agreed.

The judgment also states that the employer never returned the initial contributions of the members, so that many of these carriers ended up in losses during the time spent in the cooperative, since apart from various expenses (fuel, vehicle rental) …) and irregularly contributing to the social insurance, their social rights are damaged.

According to the resolution, the entrepreneur defrauded the carriers in two ways. He asked some of them to do part of the transportation right away, signing only the application for registration in the cooperative, while he asked others to make a monetary contribution to the cooperative.

Because of all this, he was convicted of a criminal offense against the rights of employment in actual bankruptcy with the criminal offense of serious fraud. Applying this aggravating circumstance, the Supreme Court held that “work must be considered a basic necessity of life,” so any deception that uses a job hook or job offer would fall within that consideration of aggravated fraud.

In this sense, the High Court points out that if today there is no doubt about the understanding of work as a basic need, it is even more the case when, as in the case being tried, fraud is carried out in times of crisis, in which the need for work is even greater. But in any case, at any moment, the use of work as a means of attracting a certain purpose and its use as a goal of the defrauded to lead to the personal goal of illegal enrichment of the perpetrator of the fraud necessarily entails aggravation,” he states in his resolution.