The cashier of a supermarket, accused of having appropriated 333,800 euros from the payment terminals of the establishment over a period of two years, has not reached any agreement this Thursday in the pre-trial hearing. As there is no agreement, the procedure will continue and the trial has been scheduled for January 12 at 10:00 a.m. in the Third Section of the Provincial Court of Cantabria.
In this hearing, held in the same room, the representative of the Public Prosecutor's Office announced that it will modify its provisional written statement to adopt the qualification of the facts formulated by the company, incorporating the super aggravating factor related to the high amount of the alleged embezzlement. In this way, the Prosecutor's Office will change its request for a sentence and raise it to six years and three months in prison, while the private prosecution exercised by the supermarket remains at its request for ten years in prison.
For her part, the lawyer for the accused has indicated that she will request at the trial that the possible psychological alteration of her client be taken into account, so that a mitigating factor of criminal responsibility can be applied in case a guilty verdict is issued.
This was detailed by the parties during the preliminary hearing, in which they ruled out any agreement, proposed new evidence that was accepted, and specified the proceedings that will be carried out in the trial. For the oral hearing, the Prosecutor's Office, in addition to the prison sentence for this continued crime of embezzlement, requests a fine of 4,500 euros and that the cashier compensate the establishment for the total amount of the sum allegedly stolen.
Meanwhile, the prosecution exercised by the supermarket increases the fine request to 288,000 euros. In terms of civil liability, it claims compensation of 331,750 euros, as it is stated that 2,000 euros would have been reimbursed by the accused a few days after her dismissal was formalized.
A repeated method: unplugging the terminal 1,160 times
The supermarket had two differentiated checkout lines: one in which a delivery note was generated with the list of purchased products and another exclusively for payment, as stated in the prosecutor's document. This document explains that the accused, "with the intention of profiting from others' belongings," when working at the second checkout line and attending to customers who paid in cash amounts less than 400 euros, proceeded to unplug the point of sale terminal.
With this maneuver, it was prevented that the receipt was registered in the computer system, which allowed, according to the accusation, to appropriate the amounts handed over by the customers. Over two years, she would have acted this way on 1,160 occasions. The pattern was detected by the person in charge of computer applications when reviewing various incidents: she observed that several receipts remained open and, when extending the analysis period, she verified that the same pattern repeated, at the beginning and at the end of the day and always using the credentials assigned to the accused, which identified each operation.
After this finding, the company carried out surveillance of the employee for two days and verified her behavior through security cameras. The worker was fired the next day, at which time, according to the case, she had 845 euros in one of her pockets.