Dirty money hidden under a pile of bodies at Madrids top university

Technicians at the faculty of medicine at Madrids Complutense University say they received cash-in-hand payments of around 100 to 150 a day for preparing materials and cadavers for courses held outside of normal university hours.

The finding comes in the wake of revelations published by El Mundo newspaper last month that hundreds of corpses donated for scientific study had been piling up in the universitys Anatomy II department for the last six months in unhygienic conditions.

The university put the problem down to staff shortages caused by cutbacks and ordered the disposal of the bodies. The head of the Anatomy II department, Jos Ramn Mrida, resigned over the scandal, while labor inspectors ordered the suspension of all activity at the departments crematorium because of health risks.

New revelations now point to the fact that economic interests and not just laziness, neglect and a lack of resources may have been behind the buildup of bodies in the basement of the Complutenses faculty of medicine.

According to university labor union sources, who have been accompanying the inspectors investigating the departments employees, the accounts of one technician show that they carried out at least 23 activities involving cadavers, mainly in the fields of dentistry and ophthalmology, in the past year. They were listed under the heading of continuous training courses, or renting out of spaces (with body included), two uses of the installations permitted by university management.

Nevertheless, according to the same sources and the technicians records, only one of the courses is documented as a regular payment in the workers monthly paychecks from the Complutense Foundation. The rest may have been paid under the table.

If anyone has been paid cash in hand, it is completely illegal; they are paid by monthly paycheck

Complutense University President Jos Carrillo

The subject of courses comes under the umbrella of reserved information, university president Jos Carrillo said on Monday, adding that inspectors had opened an investigation and the results would be made public in a few weeks.

If anyone has been paid cash in hand, it is completely illegal; they are paid by monthly paycheck. A department cannot have its own financing system through parallel accounts; it is illegal, he said.

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Dirty money hidden under a pile of bodies at Madrids top university