A civil servant in the Spanish province of Valencia 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 ten years until last summer, when, after colleagues began to raise suspicions, he was finally fired.

To the ire of local authorities, an attempt to prosecute him was shelved by state attorneys, who considered that his chronic and well-paid absence did not constitute a crime.

But 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, for which he has offered varying explanations.

When the criminal case against him was dropped in March, he said that he had in fact been “working like a slave” away from his desk.