Relieved, comforted by justice and, above all, very grateful to his neighbors, the former socialist mayor of Linares (55,000 inhabitants, Jaén), Juan Fernández, expressed himself after learning this Tuesday of the partial pardon by the Council of Ministers, which commuted the three-year prison sentence imposed on him for embezzlement of public funds to two years, although the seven-year disqualification penalty remains. The act of grace will allow him to avoid prison. “Mine was not corruption, it was a betrayal orchestrated by qualified members of my party,” says the former mayor of Linares from 1999 to 2018. He adds that he did not request the pardon directly: “The people asked for it, as happened with Fuenteovejuna.”
The Superior Court of Justice of Andalusia (TSJA) sentenced Fernández to three years in prison and seven years of disqualification for receiving extra payments, amounting to 125,377 euros, from the accounts of the socialist municipal group. It was last December when the Jaén Court accepted suspending the former mayor’s imprisonment while his pardon request was resolved, although it limited the delay to August 30, 2026. “The people have saved me,” says Fernández, grateful for the support received from 16 associations (led by the Himilce neighborhood federation) that gathered more than 4,000 signatures requesting the act of grace, which even had the endorsement of the PP municipal group and, later, the current local leadership of the Linares PSOE, a party from which Fernández was expelled.
Fernández recalls that it was his own party that took him to court, something he attributes to the confrontation he had with the socialist leadership over the industrial crisis Linares was experiencing, worsened by the closure of the Santana Motor automotive factory. “It was all due to a political conspiracy. The diva, Susana Díaz [former Andalusian president], asked for my head because I kept demanding investments for the industrialization of Linares,” he asserts. Later, he went to the party headquarters in Madrid to meet with José Luis Ábalos and Santos Cerdán: “They told me they could do nothing, they didn’t want to confront Seville, what an irony.” The former mayor also talks about “conspiracies” by the socialist leadership in Jaén and explicitly refers to the former provincial leader Francisco Reyes and the deputy president of the Provincial Council, Pilar Parra, whom he accuses of blocking his rise in the party.
Fernández already returned the money irregularly received, which supposedly amounted to 125,377 euros, from the accounts of the socialist municipal group. However, he has appealed that decision after the Court of Auditors reduced the amount to 41,000 euros.
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According to the sentence of the Superior Court of Andalusia, the former mayor appropriated for his own benefit, without legal authorization and without the knowledge or consent of his group, a monthly amount of 1,700 euros in cash, by issuing bearer bank checks charged to two accounts belonging to the party, which were exclusively funded by the economic allocation received from the City Council. Subsequently, the Supreme Court ruled that “allocating the municipal group’s funds to an extra salary for the person holding the position of mayor with exclusive dedication is an illicit diversion of such funds,” and made clear that it was a “monthly self-assignment that is not compensation for allowances or expenses derived from the exercise of specific activities of the group.”
Fernández never denied having received these amounts and declared so before the jury court that tried him in the Provincial Court, but he rejected having done so without the PSOE’s consent. “They decided it and proposed it. They signed it and paid me,” said the former socialist mayor, who from the beginning has maintained that there was an agreement to pay him those monthly amounts.
Although it is a partial pardon, Fernández now wants to “clean” his image before public opinion. “Now I will show my claws and nails and say what I have to say,” he warns, convinced that his conviction was due to “certain political and also judicial elements that came after me.” And he concludes: “I was always on the side of my people, who are now the ones who have saved me; I owe them my life.”
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