Brussels (EFE).- The European Commission (EC) proposed this Wednesday that embezzlement crimes throughout the European Union (EU) be punished with a maximum penalty of at least five years in prison, a maximum punishment higher than some types in the recently reformed Spanish Penal Code with an agreement between the PSOE and ERC.
This new “maximum minimum” harmonized for all the countries of the European Union appears in the recently adopted proposal for a directive on the fight against corruption, which proposes definitions and punishments with a common minimum maximum for crimes such as bribery, embezzlement , influence peddling or obstruction of justice, hitherto punished in a heterogeneous way in the different Member States.
The Brussels proposal defines embezzlement as “the commission, disbursement, appropriation or use by a public official of assets whose management has been entrusted to him directly or indirectly contrary to the purpose for which they were intended” and suggests that the The maximum sentence for these crimes is never less than five years.
The reform that changed the maximum penalty for embezzlement
The recent reform of the Spanish Criminal Code contemplates for certain cases penalties for embezzlement of 1 to 4 years, such as the Catalan leaders who called the independence referendum of October 2017.
After the reform, the Penal Code imposes, for example, from 1 to 4 years in prison to that official or public authority that gives to the public patrimony that must be administered “an application different from that to which it was intended”, although the penalty would remain in a fine if no serious damage has occurred.
If the proposal put forward by Brussels on Wednesday is approved without changes, the maximum prison sentence for this type of crime could never be less than five years.
For other crimes under the umbrella of corruption, the maximum prison terms may never be less than six years in the case of bribery in the public sector and obstruction of justice, five years in the case of bribery in the private sector. , influence peddling and abuse of power and four years for illicit enrichment related to corruption.