A civil servant has been handed a nine-year ban from public posts after it emerged he had been absent from his €50,000-a-year job for more than a decade.
Every weekday morning, Carles Recio, an archives director in Valencia's provincial government, would turn up at his office only to clock in and head straight out again, before coming back at 4pm to clock out.
It was a routine he managed to maintain for 10 years until last year, when, after colleagues began to raise suspicions, he was finally fired.
To the anger of local authorities, an attempt to prosecute him was shelved by state lawyers, who considered that his chronic absence did not constitute a crime.
However, a tribunal in Valencia has now delivered the nine-year suspension over what it said was a "flagrant neglect of the essential duties inherent to the work post".