Daughter 'claimed Spanish sailor's pension for 21 years after his death'

A Spanish woman faces a possible six-year jail sentence after being accused of claiming her dead father’s pension, worth €130,000 (£115,500) during a period of 21 years.

Court documents state that the woman, from the province of Malaga in southern Spain, failed to inform the bank where the pension was paid when, some year’s after her mother’s death, her father died in March 1995.

Instead, until 2016 she allegedly continued claiming her father’s pension from the Spanish government department responsible for maritime sector workers, using a longstanding joint account she had opened with her parents.

According to local newspaper SUR, the local public prosecutor’s office has so far only been able to recover €217 from the woman’s current account. In a gesture of goodwill, the bank where the joint account was held has already returned a further €27,043 of the pension to the government department.

In its provisional summary of the case, the state prosecution has criticised the bank for failing to check up on the death of the woman’s father, as is required under Spanish law.

If convicted the woman is convicted of the fraud charges, she faces a prison sentence of six years as well as a possible fine of €4,320, as well as returning the pension in full.

In a separate case in Malaga this week, a local court condemned a 50-year-old woman to 21 months in prison for using her dead grandfather’s savings account book to appropriate his widower’s pension of €90,500, over a period of more than a decade.

The man in question died in November 2003, but the state social security services, which paid the pension, were only informed of his death in April 2016.

In November last year, Spain’s police uncovered a nation-wide pension scam which had cost the state’s social security nearly €2m in claims for dead relatives.

In one case, a woman in Madrid claimed her mother’s pension for 31 years, totalling €173,170.43, using photocopies of her parent’s identity card or fake legal statements affirming she was still alive. Another woman told the police that emotionally she had “not got over her mother’s death” and therefore believed she had the right to her pension.

As a result of the police operation, a total of 19 people from 11 different provinces, mostly relatives of the deceased, were placed under investigation for fraud. Others involved in the same scam could not be accused, having already died themselves.