A Spanish civil servant was fined €27,000 (or around $42,000) after his boss discovered he hadn’t been to work for at least six years.
No one had noticed Joaquin Garcia wasn’t there until he was due to receive an award for “loyal and dedicated” service, according to the Guardian.
Garcia, 69, was an engineer hired in 1990 by the deputy mayor of Cadiz, Spain, to supervise a waste water treatment plant. 20 years later, his former boss wondered where he was.
“He was still on the payroll,” he told the Spanish newspaper el Mundo. “I thought, where is this man? Is he still there? Has he retired? Has he died?”
According to Garcia, he said he did come into the office, but not regularly because he was the victim of workplace bullying because of his family’s socialist policies.
But the court found he had done “absolutely no work” between 2007-10 and hadn’t been in his office for “at least six years” fined him the equivalent of one year’s salary, after tax, said the Guardian.