Decade skipping work

A SPANISH public servant who skipped work for a decade without anyone noticing spent his free time running a male brothel and drawing erotic comics.

Carles Recio (pictured), who was paid a €50,000 ($80,000) salary as an archives director in Valencia’s provincial government, would show up to the office every morning at 7:30am to clock in using the fingerprint scanner before heading home, only returning at 3:30pm to clock out.

He kept up the routine for 10 years before colleagues began to raise suspicions. After Spanish newspaper El Mundo broke the story 18 months ago, Mr Recio was finally sacked, despite his insistence that he had done nothing wrong.

“I have only done what they have asked me to do,” he told the paper.

Mr Recio maintained that he worked from home. “No one can show me a photograph in which I’m in a cafeteria, I’m a man of action,” he told the Spanish TV channel La Sexta.

“I do documentation work out of the office, the work of a slave. Working like a slave means that I work so that others get the fruit of my labour.”

State authorities abandoned an attempt to prosecute him after deciding his actions did not constitute a crime.