The Andalusian Governing Council has approved this Tuesday the appointment of Lourdes Fuster as Secretary General of the Interior and Public Entertainment, number three of the Ministry of the Presidency, Interior, Social Dialogue and Administrative Simplification directed by Antonio Sanz, the new strong man of President Juan Manuel Moreno.
Fuster was the PP’s lawyer for many years, appearing as a private prosecutor in the ERE case, which ended a few days ago with a conviction by the Supreme Court against former presidents Manuel Chaves and José Antonio Griñán and part of the leadership of their governments.
The lawyer already performed public functions in the Junta de Andalucía since the last legislature. She was deputy director of the Agency for the Environment and Water of Andalusia (AMAYA), dependent on the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock, Fisheries and Sustainable Development, and in the final stretch of the mandate she held the presidency of the Andalusian Institute of Agricultural Research and Training, Fisheries , Food and Ecological Production (IFAPA), a body attached to said ministry.
Her signing, then, was presented as a result of a selection process opened by the Ministry of Agriculture for the position of deputy director of Amaya, to which a total of 41 people had opted. This time it is a position of trust, designated by hand by the director himself.
From now on Fuster will be Antonio Sanz’s number three, who in his years as general secretary of the PP was the face and scourge of the previous socialist governments in the ERE case. It is a tandem that worked to harass the Chaves and Griñán administrations for years, from the courts -every time an order came out about the prevarication and embezzlement plot ratified by the Supreme Court- as well as in the debates in Parliament.
Along with the lawyer Luis García Navarro, former provincial deputy of the PP and until the summer of 2018 deputy secretary of the Board of Directors of the RTVA by the Andalusian PP, Fuster has represented the popular accusation exercised by the popular in the ERE case and also in others such as Invercaria, training courses, Mercasevilla, ‘Avales case’ or ‘IDEA case’ for several years.
The García Navarro & Fuster Asociados law firm was contracted by the Seville City Council between 2011 and 2015, then directed by the popular Juan Ignacio Zoido, for the legal advice of the Mercasevilla case, majority owned by the Seville City Council, for the various pieces of the macro-cause initiated by Judge Mercedes Alaya in 2009 and which gave rise to the ERE case.
Born in Seville in 1977, Lourdes Fuster has a degree in Law from the Universidad Hispalense, specializing in Business and a master’s degree in Human Resources Management and Occupational Risk Prevention. Since January 2021, she has held the Presidency of the Andalusian Institute for Agricultural, Fisheries, Food and Ecological Production Research and Training (Ifapa). Since the year 2000, she has been holding various executive positions both in private companies and in public administration. After dedicating herself to the direction of human resources, she practiced law as a free professional until her incorporation to the General Subdirectorate of the Environment and Water Agency of Andalusia (Amaya) and, later, to the Presidency of Ifapa.
Fuster’s professional profile, which has been published by the Junta de Andalucía after the Governing Council, highlights “her relationship with the university sphere, for which she has collaborated with departments such as Natural Law and Labor Law and Social Security, as well as the Center for European Documentation”, but omits her career as a lawyer and her role as legal representative of the PP accusation in the ERE case.
Sanz has made reference to the macro cause of the fraud of funds for the employment of the Board in this intervention after the Governing Council. The Minister of the Presidency, who has ruled out for the moment that he is going to assume the role of spokesperson for the Board, has explained that they will not yet claim the reimbursement of the money defrauded by the aforementioned fraud -as they had announced once there was a final judgment -.
The Supreme Court ruling is, but Sanz has clarified that the full content of the sentence is not yet known -it will be known in September- and it is still subject to an appeal before the Constitutional Court.
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