Judge Javier Santamaría, who is investigating the emergency contracts of the Andalusian Health Service (SAS) between 2020 and 2024 for an alleged crime of prevarication, has focused his first investigations on an agreement of the Government Council of October 6, 2020 that replaced prior inspection by permanent financial control (a posteriori) specifically for this type of contract with private clinics.
The magistrate and the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office have asked the Government of Juan Manuel Moreno for the file of that agreement, which is accompanied by a “justifying report” signed by the then general auditor of the Board, Amelia Martínez Sánchez, who now holds the position of deputy minister of Tax authorities. Martínez endorsed the withdrawal of prior control of emergency contracts in the SAS without a specific argument – he does not even relate it to the pandemic – and limited himself to underlining that “he considers it appropriate to update the list of expenses, bodies and services” that change their internal control system “in order to achieve greater agility and efficiency in management.”
The report does not include specific arguments in favor of a posteriori control over the SAS emergency contracts, beyond a “general” consideration for all the expenses related to the agreement, which highlights the former auditor’s confidence in the “degree of maturity or self-discipline of management processes.”
In this case, the management of SAS emergency contracts with private clinics was left in the hands of who was then managing director of the contracting body, Miguel Ángel Guzmán, today accused by the judge in the case investigating an alleged crime of prevarication, along with his two successors, Diego Vargas, and the current manager of the SAS, Valle García. The three have been summoned to court number 13 to learn their rights and will have to testify in the coming days.
Seven months after the pandemic
The Andalusian Executive approved the agreement that withdraws prior control over SAS emergency contracts seven months after the official declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic. At that time, Andalusia had 74,766 accumulated infections and 1,956 deaths. Until then, the SAS’s own contracts with private clinics – without advertising or competitive competition – required prior supervision by the Intervention of the Board, which had to authorize them before the money was released.
The Government agreement changed that control system for a more agile one: “an annual compliance audit”, that is, the auditors would review afterwards that the emergency contracts had been made in accordance with current legislation, and They would capture it in a final report, two years after the hiring.
These subsequent reports from the Central Intervention of the SAS and its eight provincial auditors are the ones that uncover the irregularities in emergency contracting in 2021, 2022 and 2023. They censure the “abuse” of the awarding by hand “when the pandemic was already very “tempered” and denounce that they lacked legal anchorage, since the exceptional legislation that the central government enabled in the worst of the pandemic to expedite the response of administrations to the health crisis had been repealed in May 2021.
These reports from the oversight body are those that have amplified the PSOE’s complaint, which gives rise to the opening of a judicial investigation for possible administrative prevarication. The socialists denounce that the agreement of the Government Council of October 6, 2020 is key, because it withdraws prior inspection as part of the “plan” to implement a “parallel system” of contracting private clinics.
This document is the one that the socialists use to extend their complaint from the SAS offices to the Government Council itself because, they say, “it seems obvious that it is not possible to keep a parallel system of public contracting alive for two and a half years. , for more than 240 million euros, without the full knowledge, consent and acquiescence of the highest levels of the Government of the Junta de Andalucía.”
From auditor to deputy minister of the Treasury
Among the documentation that the judge in the case and the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office have requested from the Board is the file of that agreement, signed by the then Minister of the Treasury – today deputy secretary general of the PP -, Juan Bravo, and signed by President Moreno himself. The agreement includes a list of expenses, bodies and services of the Andalusian Government that are subsequently audited by the Intervention, including specifically the emergency contracts in the SAS, to accelerate the awards by hand.
However, the report of the General Intervention of the Board that accompanies the agreement does not include a specific justification to explain why prior control over SAS emergency contracts is withdrawn. The auditor who signs the report – who would be appointed deputy councilor two years later – does not even mention the need to expedite procedures in the face of the health crisis caused by the pandemic, the argument that the Board will later use to defend itself against the “unfavorable” reports of the Intervention of the Board, now with another owner at the helm.
It is the only assumption in the list of new expenses, bodies and services of the Board that replace prior control with permanent supervision that lacks a specific justification in the report attached to the agreement file. Martínez subscribes to the decision of the Board for all expenses related to the annex to the agreement, always “in general terms.”
“In general for all of them, it must be said that the principle of universality or generality by which prior inspection is characterized, consisting of the prior review with a suspensive nature of all acts subject to control, is not the most appropriate in those cases where, due to massive management systems, due to the degree of maturity or self-discipline of the management processes or, simply, due to the moment of its action or due to the limited scope of its conclusions, the control system becomes an action parallel of little added value that sometimes Its only effect is to slow down management,” reads the report.
Based on this argument, the oversight body concludes that it is “more appropriate, in order to optimize the resources available to the General Intervention of the Junta de Andalucía, without reducing control actions and taking as a basis the risks detected in previous years, permanent financial control in certain personnel expenses, in compensation expenses as well as in the lines of subsidies included in this Agreement.” SAS emergency contracts are not mentioned here.
The inclusion of this type of contracts in the list of expenses that become audited a posteriori, under the premise that any “specially relevant exception” will be detected a posteriori by the Intervention and corrected by the Administration, collides with the unfavorable reports. which would end up elevating the internal control body to the Ministry of Finance.
“Without justification” in the face of a “very moderate” pandemic
In the final control reports on compliance with the regulations applicable in the emergency processing files relating to the years 2021, 2022 and 2023, presented by this newspaper, the Central Intervention of the SAS censures the Board for “improper” use of this type of contracts a year after the impact of the health crisis, he emphasizes that such a decision has “no justification” because since May 2021, “the pandemic was already very tempered”, and because it was more “foreseeable” than in 2020, therefore, “they should have already been contracted in accordance with the ordinary procedure.”
But, above all, because at that point emergency contracting did not have the same legal anchor as in 2020, since the exceptional legislation that enabled the central government in the worst of the pandemic to speed up the administrations’ response to the health crisis It had been repealed in May 2021.
The SAS continued to “abuse” that hand-picked awarding system – with which it distributed 300 million to private clinics in 2021 alone – even after receiving written instructions from the State Public Procurement Advisory Board and the SAS itself. Andalusian Ministry of Finance, warning that, at that point, “recourse to emergency contracting” aimed at “dealing with COVID-19” had to have “a exceptional and residual”.
The PSOE has attached to its complaint all these Intervention reports, which are in the possession of the judge and the prosecutor, to try to demonstrate that the premise used by the Government Council when replacing prior inspection with permanent financial control for contracts SAS emergency response was “uncertain”. “The self-discipline” of the SAS managers has been conspicuous by its absence, as demonstrated by “their accusation in the case and the repeated warnings of the interveners in their reports,” warn socialist sources.
The team of Juan Espadas, general secretary of the PSOE-A, maintains that although that change in the inspection model was justified in October 2020, upon receiving the first report from the Intervention contrary to the “abuse” of emergency contracts in the SAS during 2021, “they should have rectified or, at least, reconsidered whether those controls were working.”
The socialists denounce prevarication, embezzlement of funds, falsification of documents and membership in a criminal organization. The Andalusian Parliament will debate in this week’s plenary session precisely on the reports of the Intervention of the Board on the emergency contracts of the SAS between 2020 and 2024, based on requests for appearances from the Government Council that PSOE, Vox and PP have registered .
The socialists have demanded that the Minister of the Treasury, Carolina España, appear, to whose department the General Intervention of the Board is attached, but the president of the Chamber, Jesús Aguirre, has left in the hands of the Moreno Executive the power to decide which counselor answers the opposition’s questions.
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