The government of Juan Manuel Moreno has dismissed this Wednesday the manager of the Andalusian Health Accounts -that is, the largest budget of the Junta de Andalucía -and also responsible for defining the system of contracting works, goods and services in all health centers of the community. It is the last high position dismissed in the dome of the Ministry of Health responsible for finger contracts with private health investigating justice.
José Antonio Miranda (Jaén, 1962) has been General Director of Economic Management and Services of the Andalusian Health System (SAS) since the first Moreno government formed, in 2019, until today. The Governing Council has approved on Wednesday its cessation and the appointment of its substitute, Amparo Simón. The Minister of Health, Rocío Hernández, has defended “the huge work he has done during the pandemic,” and explained that he has “requested a break”, because “he has very close retirement.”
But Miranda, a veteran deputy of the Andalusian PP during the years of socialist government, has not been a simple manager in the administration. He has survived the cessation of two counselors, two SAS managers and a dozen high positions dismissed under the weight of unbrourdled surgical waiting lists, and a massive detour of funds to private health to try to embark, at the expense of contracts by finger, without advertising or competitive concurrence without fiscal control, which are now under the magnifying glass of the judge and the anti -corruption prosecution.
In the last five years, marked by the impact of the Covid-19 Pandemia, Miranda has directed the SAS budget policy and has designed, coordinated and executed the planning of the contracts by finger with private health for billions of euros, questioned by the SAS interveners themselves, and which at the moment investigates a court of Seville and another of Cádiz.
The courts and the Public Ministry are investigating a possible case of prevarication in the emergency contracts signed by the SAS with private clinics between 2020 and 2024, protecting themselves in a royal decree enabled during the pandemic when it was already repealed. There are three senior charges in this case, the current manager, Valle García, and their predecessors, Miguel Ángel Guzmán and Diego Varas.
The Andalusian PSOE is responsible for the complaint in the courts, where he has signed up for “very high instances of the Government” of Moreno. In their complaint they have not arrived expressly to Miranda, but they have implicitly pointed to their department, as responsible for “the definition of integrated structures for the hiring of works, goods and services, for all health centers of the Public Health System of Andalusia of each province.” “It is the Pregile of all the sauces,” say the socialists, pointing to him as “epicenter” of all contracts with finger under suspicion.
Extension and budget extensions
This exceptional (finger) hiring system for emergency situations was extended four times between 2021 and 2024, with continuous expenditure addeeses that tripled the initial budget of 70 to 243 million euros. The SAS inspectors issued unfavorable definitive reports by questioning the abuse of the emergency contract, under the excuse of the pandemic, in 2021, 2022 and 2023.
The auditors agree that the state legal framework was “fully repealed”, that since 2021 the pandemic was already “quite timeless” and was a “predictable” phenomenon, and that the extension of such contracts contravened the guidelines of the Ministry of Finance that, in May 2021, demanded in writing the person responsible for the accounts of the SAS that limited those contracts to those contracts to “exceptional and exception residual ”.
Miranda, as General Director of Economic Management of the SAS, was in charge of defending these contracts before the general intervention of the Board in the allegations to their reports. The auditors denounced “provisions of special relevance”, that is, irregularities in the hiring that SAS did not corrected despite their warnings.
The Ministry of Health always replied the same defense arguments: that the effects of the health crisis caused by the 2020 pandemic persisted three years later, that the care pressure had fired the surgical waiting lists and, therefore, they had to continue prolonging the hiring by finger to refer thousands of patients to the private one.
The Board clings to two reports from its legal cabinet, made on express demand of the SAS in 2021, which support the extensions of emergency contracts with private clinics until the summer of 2023. But the Board Supervision Body lay this argument in the final report of control over compliance with the applicable regulations in the emergency processing files 2022-2023 last July 30, 2024.
In that report the allegations of Miranda appear again, that the intervention dismisses because it considers “a rational interpretation of the norms” to justify and provide “value judgments carried out by the managing body as such”, so that “it does not enter to value them because they are not allegations to the normative breaches denounced”.
Five years of contracts by finger
The SAS has been hiring services, works and benefits by finger – without advertising or competitive concurrence or prior fiscal control – from 2019 to the present, chaining all the variants allowed by the Law of Public Sector Contracts: the emergency contract, the minor contract and, now, the negotiated contract without advertising.
Miranda has also been responsible for the justifying memories that accompany the last contracts by finger with private health this year (negotiated without advertising), which the law reserves for “unpredictable, imperative urgency and not attributable” situations to the SAS. He was also in charge of authorizing and justifying the diversion of millionaire parties from public to private health, approved in the Government Councils.
The arguments he offered, both in the allegations to the unfavorable reports of the intervention and in the supporting memories of the private financing transfers, were always the same from 2021 to very recently, that the SAS has again extended the negotiated contracts without advertising until the end of the year.
Last January, the Governing Council extended another six months the negotiated contracts without advertising with private clinics of Almería and Seville to refer hundreds of patients in the surgical waiting list, and the Board spokeswoman, Carolina España, confirmed that the extension would extend to the rest of the provinces.
The justification memory of these new extensions of contracts negotiated in 2025, signed by Miranda, reproduces the same arguments he used in defense of emergency contracts in 2021, 2022, 2023 and 2024: the pandemic and the persistent impact on Andalusian health five years later. Arguments that had already been dismissed by the SAS auditors in the definitive reports of control of emergency contracts of 2021, 2022 and 2023.
“The Covid – 19 pandemic caused a serious health crisis and relegated to the background the programmed and ordinary care activity, due to the urgent needs posed by patients with COVID – 19. This context produced an increase in the consultations of specialists in 2022 and in 2023 that assumed that patients would reach 2024 with more needs for surgical interventions, ”says the writing of the former general director of Economic Management of the SAS.
First news, March 12, 2023
eldiario.es Andalucía uncovered the continuity of the contracts to the finger of the SAS with private health on March 12, 2023, and 48 hours later the Moreno government announced its cancellation and the return to an open system, with advertising and concurrence.
But, two years later, the Junta de Andalucía has not returned to ordinary hiring in open. In September 2024 he announced a “shock plan” to reduce the bulky waiting lists of patients (surgical and diagnostic), consisting of framework agreements with contracts based signed with private clinics and a total budget of 734 million euros for a period of four years.
It was a procedure to stabilize and standardize contracts with private health, establishing homogeneous conditions for all private companies that would opt for public tenders, doing the most transparent procedure and with greater internal controls. President Moreno defended that “shock plan” in the Andalusian Parliament, when the entire blocking in block attacked him for the “scandal” of the contracts by finger.
But three months later, almost all of high positions that designed that shock plan was dismissed -including the Deputy Minister, the manager of the SAS and his attachment. Miranda was the only one who remained in his position, with one the current manager, and the new address put in a drawer the frames and reactivated the contracts by finger, this time with the modality of the negotiated without advertising, which is the one who currently persists, almost five years after the outbreak of the pandemic.
In its last justifying memory, Miranda warns that the framework agreements so that the SAS recovers the hiring in open with private health, with advertising, concurrence and greater fiscal control, “are still in process, due to the large volume of documentation of the offers received by the high concurrence of participating companies, as well as by the high number of groups and lots to which it is tendered, which has meant that the process of Hiring is being very complex. ” Asked to respect, the Minister of Health has insisted today that he hopes that they can finish “in this semester.”
In parallel to the investigation to the Andalusian government for the emergency contracts of the SAS, another judicial case investigates whether there was embezzlement in the abuse of minor contracts with private health in Cádiz, uncovering a “mass and improper fractionation” of thousands of millionaire contracts to “avoid” legislation. The Board’s auditors have censored this chopping of health contracts in a dozen unfavorable reports, which put 1,225 million euros under suspicion.
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