CIVIL SERVANT PAID FOR 10 YEARS, BUT DIDN’T WORK

MADRID A public servant has been handed a nine-year ban from public posts after it emerged he had been absent from his $75,000-a-year job for more than a decade.

Every morning, Carles Recio, an archives director in Valencia’s provincial government, would turn up at his office, clock in and head out again, before coming back at 4 p.m. to clock out.

It was a routine he managed to maintain for 10 years until last summer, when, after colleagues began to raise suspicions, he was fired. A tribunal in Valencia has now delivered the nine-year suspension over what it said was a “flagrant neglect of the essential duties inherent to the work post.”

Recio repeatedly claimed that he was not to blame for his absence. “I do documentation work out of the office, the work of a slave,” he told a television channel. “Working like a slave means that I work so that others get the fruit of my labour.”

The tribunal said investigations had failed to turn up any record of work he claimed to have done.