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 having fun with a peaceful retirement in his hometown of Barcelona to dealing with allegations by the Spanish point out that could final result in the seizure of his assets.

Mr. Mas-Colell, seventy seven several years old, was the economic system minister of Catalonia, a affluent location in northeast Spain, from 2010 to 2016. He is accused by Spain’s Court docket of Auditors, an administrative human body that oversees general public accounts, of collaborating in an alleged misuse of tens of millions of euros by allegedly encouraging to endorse Catalonia’s quest for independence from Spain, which culminated in an illegal referendum in 2017.

On Tuesday, the Court docket of Auditors imposed a penalty of up to €2.eight million on Mr. Mas-Colell, equivalent to about $3.3 million, as component of proceedings from 34 previous Catalan officials accused of illegally spending a full of €5.4 million. The accused have to fork out the hefty penalties ahead of they can enchantment from them in court.

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

“Those of us who have addressed professor Mas-Colell for a lot of several years as colleagues, pupils, and co-authors know that he is a particular person of the utmost integrity,” wrote fifty four distinguished economists from around the entire world in a letter revealed in the Spanish newspaper El País on June 22. Among the signatories had been 33 Nobel Prize winners, like Joseph Stiglitz, Amartya Sen and Robert Shiller.