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Suspicious honors at the funeral of Commissioner Morcillo’s family
Those attending the funeral mass of the mother of the chief commissioner of the Municipal Police, José Luis Morcillo, held on February 3 at the Cathedral Church of the Armed Forces, should not have been very surprised to see, together with the commanders of the body, several agents wearing the gala suit, which stand out for the use of a silver helmet with striking fuchsia-colored feathers. And it was not the first time that Morcillo ‘invited’ these agents to participate in a funeral mass for a family member, also wearing his best clothes. He already did it when his father died, according to the municipal spokeswoman for the Mixed Group, Marta Higueras. in the Ser Chain, which was the one that uncovered this new case. “You can’t have that level of arrogance,” Higueras told the radio station.
According to the Regulations of the Municipal Police, that gala dress can only be reserved for very specific official acts: parades, processions, in the accompaniment of the diplomatic corps, or in the Parade of Kings, but never in a private event, such as the cases of those two funerals.
These facts have led to the fact that in the end the director of the Municipal Police, Pablo Enrique Rodríguez, has ordered the opening of two disciplinary files, one on the municipal mayor, José Rodríguez Vacas, and the other on the Morcillo commissioner himself, on whom the Gala Unit depends. The two will have to testify before the new commissioner general Óskar de Santos, who has been appointed instructor of the case. The process will be internal “to guarantee confidentiality”, according to what the Government spokesperson and delegate for Security and Emergencies, Inmaculada Sanz, announced on Thursday.
Despite the many suspicions that the head of the Municipal Police broke the rules, both Sanz and Almeida himself defended him and assured that, according to their news, there was “no type of instruction” nor had “any internal order” so that the agents would come to this private act in their gala suits. Sanz even went so far as to say that they participated in the event in a personal capacity. The mayor, for his part, also asked for “prudence” until everything that has happened is found out. “It seems somewhat hasty to me, as the left is intended, to ask for the dismissal of Commissioner Morcillo who, by the way, has been in the Municipal Police for many years,” he concluded.
The opposition, however, believes that there are sufficient reasons to ask for their dismissal. At least Morcillo’s. “We understand that the police must be especially exemplary, so the sanction must also be exemplary,” says Marta Higueras in statements to elDiario.es. As she explains, the sanctions for very serious misconduct range from separation from service, forced transfer or separation of functions from three months to 6 years. If it is a serious offense, the sanction of suspension of functions ranges from 5 days to three months.
The government spokeswoman, however, hinted in her last appearance that their behavior in principle will not mean that they are stripped of their positions. “What these sanctions establish are suspensions of days of employment and salary, which will depend on what has been accredited,” Sanz clarified.
Higueras, on the other hand, believes that the open file should at least end “with the imputation of a very serious offense and that a relevant sanction be imposed since it is not the first time they have done it.” In addition, he recalls, “they deceived the government spokeswoman who said false things at a press conference.”
The case was debated in the Security and Emergencies Commission at the request of the Joint Group, where Higueras has already warned that “the use of public resources for a private event is something that is absolutely penalized and is a very serious offense.” During the session, all the spokespersons for the opposition groups agreed that it had to be Commissioner Morcillo himself who gave the internal service order for these agents to appear in full dress at the funerals of their relatives. “The agents did not act on their own,” said the councilor of Recupera Madrid, who also believed that otherwise “the Municipal Police commanders should have told those agents that they could not be there [en la misa funeral] and that they had to go home”. Consequently, he maintained that there was “an improper use of the money from the municipal coffers”, and argued that in the case of having “required” the presence there of the agents, they should charge for work overtime”.
“The fact that no file has been opened on the agents who were dressed in gala shows that they came in compliance with an order from their superior, in this case Mr. Vacas, and that therefore they neither acted in their personal capacity nor wore the suit of gala on their own, but they had an order and a service report”, the spokesperson for the Mixed Group insists to this wording. Despite the attempts of the mayors who have denounced this case, said internal order has not appeared.
“We hoped that the Commissioner would not leave his subordinates stranded, letting the public and the Delegate herself think that they had committed a fault. We hoped that Mr. Morcillo would live up to his position and would have come out from the first moment to assume his responsibility , but given that this has not been the case, an exemplary sanction should fall on him and Vacas,” adds Higueras, whose group does not rule out “judicial measures if the sanction is not exemplary.”
More controversies in which Morcillo has been involved
The truth is that Morcillo’s career at the head of the Municipal Police has been dotted with several controversies from the moment he was appointed chief inspector of the Corps by Mayor José María Álvarez del Manzano, of the PP. On January 23, 2003, the Superior Court of Justice of Madrid annulled his appointment due to a formal defect that was corrected later. He then continued in the position during the mandate of Alberto Ruiz-Gallardón, and after a brief parenthesis, also with Ana Botella, being then assigned to the Patrimonial Security Division.
In May 2016, the Government of Manuela Carmena removed him from his duties as head of that department. for benefiting a security company that had been awarded a contract. As reported and published by this newspaper, Morcillo prepared a report full of irregularities for that award that was annulled by the Public Procurement Court (TACP).
The ruling ruled that the award to the company Segural SL of the protection and security of all dependent buildings in the Madrid district of Chamartín for one year, between March 31, 2015 and April 1, 2016, be annulled. For this concept , Segural was going to receive 389,856.96 euros from public funds”. The Court also ordered the repetition of the entire bidding process. The fact is that Morcillo had interrupted his professional career in 2007 when he requested a leave of absence to become director General of Falcon, a private security company.
In 2017, being a sub-inspector of the Municipal Police, Morcillo was once again at the center of the controversy when he was Filed for an action allegedly intended to save a heavy sanction to a nightclub in Madrid. As published in its day elDiario.es, the Internal Affairs Unit investigated him for allegedly coercing subordinates and maneuvering to avoid a sanction against the Lab nightclub for hosting a techno party. At that time, Miguel Ángel Flores, the businessman convicted of four reckless homicides in the Madrid Arena case, works in said premises. The investigation was finally archived.