16 February, 2016

By VIVA Team

Office desk with overflowing inbox

Nice work if you can get it: A Spanish man has received six years’ pay for doing not a single day’s work.

There are days when you simply want to get your head down at work and not speak to anybody. Either you’re tired, hungover, extremely busy or simply do not feel in the mood for water cooler chat, everybody has those days when they want to appear invisible at work.

But a Spanish civil servant has taken things to another level after being absent from his job for six years… with nobody noticing…

Joaquín García ‘worked’ as an engineer for Cádiz’s municipal water company, and for a total of six years collected his monthly wage but not once showed up to the office.

His ruse was only flagged up recently after the company scoured its records and wanted to reward García for 20 years of loyal service. Having been put in charge of a waste-water treatment plant in 2004, García then spent the next six years doing no work, and not even turning up to his desk in the southwestern area of the city.

Local deputy mayor Jorge Blas Fernández told El Mundo that there had been a mix-up between the water company and the council. “We thought that he had been supervised by the water company but that was not the case,” Fernández said. “I wondered whether he was still working there, had he retired, had he died? But the payroll showed he was still receiving a salary.”

The mayor then personally called García for an explanation. “I asked him ‘What did you do yesterday? The month before? The month before that?’ He didn’t know what to say.”

In his defence, García – who is now 69 and ‘officially’ retired – said that he did not want to report the situation because he did not want his paychecks to cease because he had a family to support. Asked why he stopped going to work, he said simply that he had been a victim of workplace bullying and was given no work to do.

A court in Cádiz has ordered García to repay €27,000 of the wages he received – a figure that is below the annual €37,000 salary he was receiving, but the highest amount that the court was legally allowed to reclaim.