Jailed former FC Barcelona president’s Christmas release criticised

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/dec/26/former-barcelona-president-christmas-prison-release

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The former president of Barcelona football club, who is serving a jail sentence for a €13m (£10m) tax fraud, was allowed home from prison for Christmas – sparking allegations of favouritism for high-profile prisoners.

Josep Lluís Núñez and his son, who was convicted alongside his father of defrauding the government, were given day release from Barcelona’s Quatre Camins prison after serving five weeks of their 26-month sentences.

A prison workers’ union said its members would have to “put a brave face on this discriminatory treatment”. It said day release was meant to be reserved for inmates who have served at least a third of their sentence.

The union pointed out that the prison Christmas meal that Núñez and his son missed was pizza, with more traditional fare having been ditched this year due to cutbacks.

Hours after the pair’s release, Spain’s new monarch, King Felipe VI, said in his first televised Christmas address that Spanish authorities must “ruthlessly eradicate corruption”. This week his sister Cristina de Borbón was ordered to stand trial on two charges of tax fraud.

Núñez, 83, spent 22 years in charge of FC Barcelona until 2000, a year after the judicial inquiry into a tax fraud ring began. He was initially sentenced to six years for his role in the criminal network that bribed tax inspectors so they would approve fraudulent filings.

Spain’s supreme court later reduced the sentence, and judges in Barcelona finally sent Núñez to jail in November, noting that he had “shown no signs of remorse whatsoever”.