Spain’s Targeting of Former Harvard Professor Provokes Trans-Atlantic Outcry

BARCELONA—In just two months, Andreu Mas-Colell, an internationally renowned economist and previous Harvard professor, went from experiencing a tranquil retirement in his hometown of Barcelona to experiencing allegations by the Spanish point out that could final result in the seizure of his property.

Mr. Mas-Colell, seventy seven many years old, was the financial system minister of Catalonia, a affluent area in northeast Spain, from 2010 to 2016. He is accused by Spain’s Court of Auditors, an administrative system that oversees public accounts, of taking part in an alleged misuse of thousands and thousands of euros by allegedly aiding to encourage Catalonia’s quest for independence from Spain, which culminated in an illegal referendum in 2017.

On Tuesday, the Court of Auditors imposed a penalty of up to €2.8 million on Mr. Mas-Colell, equivalent to about $three.three million, as part of proceedings in opposition to 34 previous Catalan officials accused of illegally paying a whole of €5.4 million. The accused have to shell out the weighty penalties right before they can enchantment in opposition to them in courtroom.

Mr. Mas-Colell, whose textbook on microeconomics is broadly utilised at U.S. universities, has been a professor at Harvard College and the College of California, Berkeley, as properly as in Spain. The accusations in opposition to him have sparked an outcry among the fellow economists in the U.S., Europe and Asia.

“Those of us who have dealt with professor Mas-Colell for a lot of many years as colleagues, college students, and co-authors know that he is a particular person of the utmost integrity,” wrote fifty four distinguished economists from close to the entire world in a letter released in the Spanish newspaper El País on June 22. Amid the signatories were 33 Nobel Prize winners, together with Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Robert Shiller.