A civil servant has been handed a nine-year ban from public posts after it emerged he had been absent from his 50,000 Euro-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 summer, 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 attorneys, 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” Mr Recio has repeatedly claimed that he was not to blame for his absence.

“I do documentation work out of the office, the work of a slave,” he told the Spanish television channel La Sexta.

“Working like a slave means that I work so that others get the fruit of my labour”

The Valencian tribunal rejected that explanation, noting that investigations had failed to turn up any record of work he claimed to have done over the decade-long period. Neither did it find any evidence for his claim that he had told his superiors he had been left without a desk following an earlier relocation of his offices.

The tribunal had strong criticism for the provincial Government, which it said had failed to properly supervise the assignment of work spaces. Mr Recio then “became comfortable in the situation that benefited him”, it said in its verdict.

Mr Recio’s absence would have been impossible “without the acquiescence or the disinterest of the administration for which he worked,” it said.