The Court of Instruction Number 13 of Seville has accepted for processing a complaint filed by the PSOE of Andalusia last June against the Government of the Junta, of the PP, for “alleged embezzlement and prevarication” in the awarding of emergency contracts between 2021 and 2023 by the Andalusian Health Service (SAS). These contracts, for a total value of 300 million euros, were awarded using the exceptional procedure approved for the pandemic.
The Andalusian PSOE has been questioning the alleged abuse of contract hiring by the SAS for a year and a half through contracts without competitive competition, without control and without publicity, and which were extended not only after article 16 of the Real was repealed. Decree 7/200 that protected the exceptional nature of this type of contracts during the pandemic, but two years after the Ministry of Finance itself issued an instruction in 2021 warning that emergency contracting should already have a residual nature.
“The Moreno Bonilla Government has evaded public procurement regulations in an obscene manner. Now there is an investigation open into the Moreno Government for clear and serious irregularities, and we will begin to find out who the beneficiaries are,” Espadas stated this morning during a call to the media to report on the complaint, which Cadena Ser reported. “We are talking about a modus operandinot something exceptional,” he added.
The SAS Intervention itself has questioned the processing of express contracting in the audits it has carried out of its contractual activity in 2020 and 2021. The supervisory body has issued separate unfavorable reports in which it maintains that the emergency contracts and their extensions that were carried out during that period contravened the Public Procurement Law as they were not justified; and, in the case of those of 2021, it also points out that article 16 of Royal Decree Law 7/2000 that protected them was no longer in force, and that the incidence of the pandemic was then “very tempered.”
The Intervention considers that the abuse of these contracts caused “risk situations” in public spending because, as they were not processed through the free competition procedure, the conditions of solvency, aptitude or capacity of the successful bidders could not be verified. In its 2020 report, the supervisory body made up to 11 recommendations that the SAS—except one—did not take into account in the round of hiring it carried out in 2021. The 2022 and 2023 reports are pending. The Intervention does not operate in advance, because in 2020 the Andalusian Government decided to replace the prior inspection system in the Ministry of Health – which required reporting on the suitability or otherwise of contracts prior to their signing – with continuous inspection, which allows only control a posteriori.
At the same time, the SAS intervention also carried out audits of the provincial contracting platforms. Specifically, as the Andalusian PSOE reported a few weeks ago, in nine of them the supervisory body issued reports in which it warned, also between 2020 and 2021, of irregularities such as the fragmentation of contracts to prevent them from being competitively tendered, or extensions outside the law, which question the lack of justification of the need for an emergency. According to the content of these audits advanced by elDiario.es, Contracts were fragmented “in fraud of law” worth 458 million in 2021. The intervention has given the SAS six months to collect its recommendations and avoid submitting an action report.
In March 2022, the PSOE-A already requested an investigation commission in the Andalusian Parliament to analyze the SAS emergency contracts that the advance of the regional elections prevented from being processed. That same request was rejected last April thanks to the absolute majority of the PP in the autonomous Chamber. The Andalusian socialists also announced a year and a half ago their intention to take this abuse of contracting by hand to the courts. Finally, the complaint was filed on June 20 – although since then they assured that they were still preparing it, Espadas himself insisted on Tuesday that he would go to court – signed by 30 deputies, which was expanded in the month of July. The general secretary of the Andalusian socialists indicated this morning that they plan to expand it with information from the provincial audits and has justified hiding its presentation from the media due to a “procedural strategy” and to “respect judicial independence” so that they can work “no pressure of any kind.”
The Junta de Andalucía has defended the validity and legality of contract hiring by the SAS when the regulatory provisions that protected it were repealed, appealing to the fact that they passed all internal and external legality controls since in that period of 2020 and 2021 “The important thing was to save lives,” according to its spokesperson, Carolina España, said last week. The same argument that the new Minister of Health, Rocío Hernández, used this morning, who has also insisted on denying that the SAS hired “in fraud of the law.” “We were in the middle of the Covid pandemic,” he insisted. Sources from the Government of Juan Manuel Moreno also emphasize that no funds were diverted for private use.
Asked about this, the deputy secretary of the PP and former counselor of the Presidency of the Junta de Andalucía, Elías Bendodo, has conveyed the “maximum respect for the judicial decision”, while emphasizing that “admission for processing is a formal procedure”, reports Elsa García de Blas. “I see a lot of nervousness from the PSOE, when they are the kings of corruption in Spain, unfortunately it was in my land where socialism stole 700 million euros from the Andalusian unemployed,” Bendodo stated in Congress. “Maximum peace of mind, everything has been done correctly.”
The management of public health has become the Achilles heel of the Moreno Government. To the collapse of primary care and the threat of trying to arrange it, has been added unbridled waiting lists with more than a million Andalusians awaiting an appointment to be operated on or treated by a specialist. To stop it, the Board announced in October 2023 a change in the contracting system – part of which is now being investigated by the justice system – that contemplated agreeing with the private sector for 734 million euros in four years, a plan that was frustrated because it was appealed by a company that was participating in the competition and was temporarily replaced by a shock plan of 283 million, of which 42% would go to private healthcare through, again, hand-picked contracts, without competitive competition.