Partial win on sentence appeal for former IAM chief tried for abuse of power

A former Municipal Affairs Bureau (IAM) Chief of the Division of Animal Inspection and Control, accused of abuse of power with the purpose of self-enrichment, has partially won an appeal of his sentence to the Court of Second Instance (TSI), claiming that the First Instance Court (TJB) had erred.

The former chief had been sentenced by the TJB in January 2020 for two counts of the crime of abuse of power in the continuous form, which implies that crimes have been repeatedly committed over a period and that there was an external factor conditioning these actions which could be considered mitigating.

Analyzing the appeal, the TSI judges agreed that, on the first count of the crime, the defendant had been appropriately sentenced for a crime performed over time. On the second count, however, it was proven that the defendant only once took advantage of his unlawful conduct to produce a benefit to himself and to a private company he was part of, accepting the appeal of the defendant on this section.

Nonetheless, the TSI noted that for the second count of the crime of abuse of power, there were no mitigating factors that could justify the reduction of the penalty to be applied, sentencing the defendant to one year and six months of imprisonment for this count, leading to a total sentence of four years imprisonment.

According to the ruling of the courts, the defendant had made use of his position within the government department to create a company with other defendants on the same case through a hidden share, which they used to personal advantage by supplying veterinary services to the IAM between June 2012 and February 2019, namely related to the neutering of greyhounds from the former Canidrome.