The Government Council approved this Wednesday the dismissal of the general auditor of the Junta de Andalucía, María Antonia González Pavón, a position organically dependent on the Ministry of Economy and Finance and in charge of supervising public accounts.
González Pavón was appointed in September 2022, at the beginning of the current legislature, and only five months later she submitted a very harsh action report to the Minister of the Treasury – a kind of code red in the face of criminal signs – warning of the “undue and massive” division. ” of million-dollar contracts in the Andalusian Health Service (SAS) that evaded the Public Sector Contracts Law.
Two years later, the provincial auditors of the SAS issued definitive audit reports, denouncing the same continued “abuse” of “minor contracts in fraud of law”, and calling into question the system of awarding by hand, cutting up contracts for an amount higher than the 1,225 million euros. An investigation by elDiario.es Andalucía revealed the content of all those Intervention reports that the Minister of the Treasury, Carolina España, had received, and that two years after the recommendations and warnings of irregularities by the internal oversight body, they continued to be awarded to the public. .
Sources from the Ministry of Finance explain to this newspaper that González Pavón’s dismissal is due to “personal reasons”, that “she herself had asked to leave a long time ago, for family reasons and personal fatigue.” The same sources indicate that the counselor herself had asked her to “hold on a little longer.”
A court in Seville and the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office are investigating the emergency contracts that the SAS awarded privately to private clinics between 2020 and 2024 for a possible crime of prevarication. The open case stems from a complaint by the PSOE, which has so far led to the indictment of the current manager of the SAS, Valle García, and her two predecessors.
The socialists have also denounced the abuse and massive division of minor contracts in Andalusia, following the report of the general auditor and the eight provincial audits – which coincide in questioning the “vice” of the hand-picked awarding procedure – but at the moment they have not They have added it to their complaint in court.
An action report or code red
The action report of the General Intervention of the Board that González Pavón signed, dated November 13, 2022, denounced the “specially relevant reservations” and with “serious negative effects” in the contracting of the SAS in Huelva, after that the managing directorate had exhausted all deadlines and prior warnings from its auditors without “compliance with the recommendations made by the Intervention in the financial control reports” corresponding to the year 2019, prior to the Covid pandemic.
The document questioned the individual award procedure in the SAS, but stopped short of mentioning a case of “impairment of public funds.” The general auditor of the Board, responsible for the report, shortly afterwards prepared some instructions (2/2023, of March 27) that establish “the criteria to follow in the issuance of an action report”, noting that the new regulations no longer contemplated the issuance of the aforementioned report in the event of “circumstances that could cause a detriment to public funds.”
“The new Intervention Regulations do not contemplate this last assumption as a reason for issuing an action report,” the instructions read, to clarify that “in the aforementioned situation”, the General Intervention of the Board that “notices the existence of violations provided for in article 109 of the General Law of Public Finance” – for example, embezzlement of funds – “will be brought to the attention of the head of the Department responsible for Finance matters.”
“Conformity” of the Ministry of Health
The action report on the splitting of contracts in the SAS that the General Intervention sent to the Treasury in 2022 has the “conformity” of the Minister of Health, which opened a period of six months for the SAS to correct the “serious reservations” detected, and for the supervisory body to “monitor the proposed corrective measures.”
The General Intervention did not put specific expenditure files under suspicion, as a result of its audit, but rather the entire “flawed” procedure of minor contracting, as the SAS auditors would do again in Huelva, Cádiz, Córdoba and Jaén two years later, in their final financial control reports corresponding to the year 2021:
“The legally established procedure in the contracting of works, goods and services has been totally and absolutely dispensed with, dividing the purpose of the contracts”, awarding “minor contracts with a completion period of more than one year”, and “without the reports and “authorizations” required by the competent management, the reports agree, after concluding that the chosen awarding procedure by hand has served to “evade” open contracting, with advertising and competitive competition, established by the Public Sector Contracts Law .
In May 2024, the SAS auditors in Huelva published an unfavorable final report that once again denounced the abuse of minor contracts “in fraud of the law.” The document included the Monitoring of the measures adopted after the issuance of the performance report of the General Intervention, of 2022, stating that “two of the three recommendations that the SAS auditors already made two years before “have not been implemented”, “along with the clear non-compliance with one of the measures to be adopted.”
However, the same report admitted that “public procurement deadlines may be longer than desired,” so “we do not conclude either that the noted deficiencies have not been corrected” for the General Comptroller to urge the head of the Ministry of Finance to submit the actions to the consideration of the Government Council.”
The Minister of Finance and spokesperson for the Board – at that time head of the General Comptroller – has not explained the reasons for her dismissal in the appearance after the meeting of the Government Council. He has limited himself to reporting on the appointment of his replacement, Miguel Ángel Figueroa Teva, an official of the Superior Body of General Administrators of the Junta de Andalucía.
Figueroa Teva has a degree in Political Science and Sociology from the University of Granada and has extensive experience in the field of administrative and financial management. He has been delegated auditor of the Ministry of Education (2005–2009); delegate auditor of the Ministry of Finance and Administration (2009–2013); Comptroller of Financial Control (2013–2017), and director of the Public Health Expenditure Control Division of the General Comptroller of the Government of Andalusia and central comptroller of the SAS, between 2017 and 2018.
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