The Ministry of the Interior has decided to dismiss the new head of the National Police of Lleida, Commissioner Antonio José Royo Subías, after learning that he had been convicted in June 2003 by the Provincial Court of Gipuzkoa for harassing a subordinate so that she had sexual relations with him in exchange for social benefits and for giving her “a slap on the buttock”, EL PAÍS confirmed with Interior sources. The dismissal will be published this Tuesday. Royo, 63 years old and who took office on December 9, was considered the author of an offense of sexual harassment aggravated by the assertion of superiority, for which he was sentenced to a fine of 1,080 euros and to compensate the victim with 3,000 euros. The sentence did not include any accessory penalty of disqualification (it was integrated into a 2022 reform of the Penal Code), so the agent continued in the police force and was promoted to commissioner in 2017.
The decision of the Gipuzkoa court – confirmed a year later by the Supreme Court – considered as proven that the police commander, who was then chief inspector of a group of the Police Intervention Unit (UIP, colloquially known as the riot police) based in San Sebastián, had started harassing, in March 1999, an officer two days after she joined the group. According to the judgment, the command asked her “to have sexual relations with him, for this he indicated to her that her incorporation into the group had taken place with his intervention and that if she accepted his requests, he would ensure that she obtained allowances for trips to other cities, more days of rest, permits, promotion facilities and otherwise he indicated that she would become his enemy, with what they assumed in the boss-subordinate relationship, of assignment to worse services, etc.”
The sentence continues that the chief inspector at the time, “both alone and in the company of third parties, made comments of a humiliating nature about her anatomy and menstruation”. “You have a few days left before your period,” he blurted. According to the magistrates, all this affected the woman’s relationships with the rest of the members of her unit. The judgment details that during a meal organized in Pamplona attended by members of the police group, the commander “hit the buttocks” of the victim, who ended up suffering from “adaptive disorder with chronic anxiety”, among other conditions, which required pharmacological treatment and psychotherapy.
This is not the first time that the appointment of Commissioner Royo Subías to a senior position has been surrounded by controversy. At the time when Juan Ignacio Zoido was head of the Interior, in the last stage of the government of Mariano Rajoy, this command was called the Judicial Police Brigade of the Superior General Directorate of Aragon, to which depended, among other groups, the Unit for Attention to Family and Women (UFAM), specialized in the fight against gender, domestic and sexual violence. Then, when his criminal record became known, Royo was fired by Grande-Marlaska and transferred to another position in the same autonomous community, according to what was revealed at the time. Later, in 2021, the commissioner obtained a position in a Spanish embassy abroad, one of the most sought-after destinations within the National Police due to its high financial remuneration. More precisely, it was in Algeria. This appointment then sparked criticism from police unions.
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