The Catalan Government has awarded on Tuesday its largest ambulance contract to the Group La Pau, a cooperative that abandoned the Basque Country last November after receiving half a hundred labor inspection minutes and sanctions by the Basque Executive, which ended up seized the endorsement that this company deposited at the beginning of the service.
This group, together with another company, will manage the ambulances of the Northern Metropolitan Zone, after winning the largest batch of the tender, which amounts to almost 381 million euros.
In total, the contest to award health transport until 2030 throughout Catalonia amounts to 1,970 million. The greatest beneficiary has been Falck Sanitary Services, which has managed to stay three of the 10 lots – the maximum allowed – and will manage the ambulances in the demarcations of the Penedès, Girona – Alt Maresme and the Sud metropolitan area.
This newspaper reported that doubts about the solvency of the Grup the Pau worried the members of the contracting table, who approved, unanimously, the request for more documentation to this company due to the “complicated economic situation” that, according to the Basque Government, had the company.
All accounting of 2024 was requested as well as balances, the profit and loss account, net equity movements and a detailed memory to clarify all numbers.
The Servei d’Efrències Mèdiques (SEM) also demanded a business plan for the next two years that guaranteed “the principle of company in operation”. That is: all the income and expenses and equity movements that the cooperative intends to make between 2025 and 2027.
Grup himself Pau admitted last June that was close to “technical bankruptcy” after accumulating more than nine million in losses between 2021 and 2024.
Between January 31, 2019 and November 25, 2024, a period in which this cooperative managed part of the ambulances in the Basque Country, the Grup the PAU was the subject of more than 55 labor inspection records for various irregularities.
The reasons for the minutes were several. It was found that the cooperative used vehicles assigned to the Basque Health Service for other contracts with private clinics, also that the PAU accumulated debts with the workforce: most workers must still be money from the extra summer pay and A salary plus that the template won in the courts.
12 million in embraced guarantees
The agency responsible for the execution of public contracts in the Basque Country and the Vice Ministry of Sanitary Administration and Financing decided, last November, to terminate the contract with the Grup the PAU before its “poor management”. Both the Basque Executive and the Cooperative agreed to an “orderly departure” of the company in Bizkaia and Álava, the provinces in which it provided its service.
The cooperative, however, requested to agree on its departure that the Basque Government would pay entirely the payrolls of the month of November as well as the rest of money owed to the employees and renounce “further claims for any concept”.
The Basque Executive refused to claim that he could not assume, “arbitrarily”, the expenses that compete with one of his contractors “for the simple fact that said contractor is in a complicated economic situation.”
Given the risk of default, the Euskadi government issued an order at the end of November to seize the guarantees deposited by the Grup la Pau when it won the contest in the Basque Country and use that money to pay for the debts left by the cooperative.
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