After nearly four decades with the Alicante Public Prosecutor’s Office, including the last two as the head of Anticorruption, Felipe Briones has stepped away from the provincial institution following the BOE publication of his appointment to the Supreme Court, for which he was proposed at the most recent meeting of the Fiscal Council on the seventh of the month.
Briones spent this Tuesday at the Public Prosecutor’s Office headquarters, near the Town Hall square, where his office had been located and where he marked his final day before joining his new assignment. He will begin work in one of the Penal sections of the High Court after taking office on the fifteenth, once he returns from Easter holidays.
With the backing of the deputy prosecutor of the General Prosecutor’s Office, Ángeles Sánchez Conde; the head of the Prosecutor’s Inspection, María Antonia Sanz; and the two members of the Union Progresista de Fiscales (UPF), in which Briones is a member, he secured the sole available position in that section.
His departure to the Supreme Court creates a vacancy in the Alicante provincial staff that the chief prosecutor, Jorge Rabasa, will seek to fill in the coming days on an interim basis.
The next step will be to determine how to handle the gap left in Anticorruption, where Briones previously shared responsibilities with Pablo Romero, who will now operate solo in an area of particular complexity.
Vacancy and supports
As in similar prior situations, the vacancy will be announced within the provincial Prosecutor’s Office so that anyone with interest can apply, a process commonly referred to as a mini-competition. Rabasa noted that until the position is definitively filled, the two Anticorruption liaison officers in the province, Fran Marco in Elche and Luis Cabrera at the Benidorm office, will assist Romero in this matter.
Felipe Briones entered the public prosecutor service in 1985. His first posting was with the Public Prosecutor’s Office in Las Palmas, and since 1986 he has worked in Alicante. He is also a Justice of the First Instance and Instruction since 1986, currently on leave. He has held the roles of coordinator of Social, Occupational Accidents, Environment, Consumer, Immigration, and Civil Registry investigations.
His ascent to the Supreme Court’s Public Prosecutor’s Office comes almost a decade after former Alicante chief prosecutor Juan Carlos López Coig moved there, a development that makes it quite likely they will cross paths again in the penal section where a vacancy exists following the retirement of Carmelo Quintana.
In the summer of 2020 Briones vied for the leadership of the Alicante Public Prosecutor’s Office with Jorge Rabasa, who had served in the post since 2014 and sought reelection. On that occasion the Fiscal Council, influenced by conservative members, favored Rabasa’s continuity through reelection.
Another notable development involved the departure of Teresa Gisbert, the Public Prosecutor who had been named by the same council as Briones to oversee the Office’s Juvenile Division. She has since moved to a different coordination role within the system.
The move signals a reshuffle in the Alicante office and raises questions about how the Anticorruption unit will adapt to leadership changes, and how the broader public prosecutors’ team will reconfigure around Romero and the new arrangements.