The PSOE’s complaint for the Andalusian Government’s contracts with private clinics includes up to four crimes of corruption that the socialists accuse of high-ranking and former officials of the Ministry of Health: administrative prevarication, embezzlement of public funds, falsification of public documents and criminal organization, the latter punishable by up to eight years in prison.
The socialists’ complaint directly points to two specific directors, that of Miguel Ángel Guzmán, manager of the Andalusian Health Service (SAS) between November 2019 and July 2022; and his replacement, Diego Vargas, who held this position until December 2023. The popular accusation asks that they be cited as investigated, along with officials, SAS auditors and the authors of the legal reports that endorsed these contracts.
The Government of Juan Manuel Moreno promoted Guzmán to Deputy Minister of Health after the June 2022 elections, but dismissed him five months after his appointment, after the large waiting lists for surgery that the Andalusian Government had been waiting for for a year and a half became public. unpublished (the increase in Andalusians outside the legal deadline to be attended reached 227% in one year).
Three months after his dismissal, Guzmán signed for the hospital group HLA (Asisa), one of the main beneficiaries of the handwritten contracts signed by Guzmán himself as manager of the SAS, and which is now being investigated by the investigating court number 13 of Seville. for a case of administrative prevarication. It is the only crime, of the four reported by the PSOE, that the judge has admitted to investigating, in a case that the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has just joined.
The socialists accuse the Board of setting up a “parallel system of public contracting by hand” with private clinics, extending the exceptional legal framework that the central government enabled during the pandemic (2020) until June 2023. During that period, the SAS awarded by hand, without advertising or competitive competition or prior inspection, up to 300 million euros.
The complaint points to the former number two in the Ministry of Health and his successor in the SAS as those most responsible for the alleged corruption crimes, but the PSOE leaves the door open to implicate the leadership of Moreno’s Executive. “It seems obvious that it is not possible to keep a parallel public contracting system 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 of Andalusia,” reads the complaint, filed by Diario de Sevilla, and to which eldiario.es has had access.
The signer of the contracts by hand
The name of Miguel Ángel Guzmán already caused a monumental political crisis in the Andalusian Government a year ago, when he signed for Asisa three months after his dismissal as deputy minister, violating the Law of Incompatibilities of Senior Officials. During his two and a half years as manager of the SAS, Guzmán awarded contracts worth 43.6 million euros to 11 private hospitals and clinics of the Asisa Group in Andalusia, the company that appointed him medical director in this community three months later. to leave the Administration.
The emergency contracts (by hand) to clean up the waiting lists by sending patients to the private sector were carried out between January 2021 and June 2023, with the declared purpose of alleviating the “overload on the own network derived from the covid-19 pandemic.” ”, according to the title of the files revealed by eldiario.es on March 12, 2023.
This exclusive and some subsequent deliveries appear among the documentation that the PSOE has included in the complaint. 48 hours after being published, the spokesperson for the Board, Ramón Fernández Pacheco, announced the suspension of the emergency contracting system, which they had been extending for more than two years based on a now repealed Covid Royal Decree.
The first complaint from the PSOE focuses on the initial emergency file (no. 110/2021), dated 20, 2021, with an initial budget of 70 million euros, and which bears the signature of Guzmán, as manager of the SAS. . That file was extended four times for two years, and its budget was stretched with continuous spending addendums to exceed 242.7 million. The last extension of spending expired seven months before Guzmán left office as number two in the ministry (on December 27, 2023) and ten months before signing for Asisa.
In their complaint, the socialists quantify the crime of embezzlement of public funds at more than 24 million euros, a figure they extract from 10% of those 243 million awarded by hand between 2021 and 2023. That 10% is the average reduction that usually occurs in public procurement by the Board on bidding prices, when the open procedure is used, with advertising and competitive competition, as a result of the different offers made by companies interested in winning the contract.
The abuse of contracting by contract for more than two years restricted this free competition, which resulted in “an alleged and indicative injury to the Andalusian public wealth.” Another of the crimes that the complaint indicates is that of document falsification, because two of the resolutions for extensions of the contracts by hand are handwritten and signed by hand, already in the year 2023.
Support of the Laundering Unit and State Intervention
The jump from the Health Administration to one of the companies most favored by contract hiring unleashed a political storm. The Moreno Government opened an internal investigation that concluded that the signing of Guzmán violated the Law on Incompatibilities of Senior Positions, but only for a few months, because they counted the mandatory two-year period from his departure from the SAS management, and not from his dismissal as vice-counselor.
In any case, the Board managed to abort the appointment and Asisa left it up in the air whether it would sign him again starting in July 2024, when the two years since his departure from the SAS expired.
The decision of the Public Ministry to assign the judicial case of the contract contracts in Andalusia to Anti-Corruption, instead of the ordinary Prosecutor’s Office, put the Moreno Executive in check. To date, they have underestimated the importance of the PSOE’s complaint, but this Thursday, in the corridors of Parliament, the Andalusian president already revealed that they are studying taking part in the case.
The PSOE registered the complaint in court on June 20, focusing on the original file signed by Guzmán, but later added two extensions after learning of “new criminal evidence” that has expanded both the supposedly criminal charge and the time horizon in which it was committed. produce the facts.
On July 31, the socialists included in the investigation the final “unfavorable” report of the SAS Central Intervention relating to the 2021 financial year, which reproduced a large part of the story published until then in this newspaper’s information on emergency contracts. The auditors also accused the Board of having used a “fully repealed” state legal framework to continue extending “without any justification” a system of contract hiring “inappropriately,” when the pandemic was already “very tempered.”
The team of Juan Espadas, general secretary of the PSOE-A, first registers a complaint pointing out the criminal acts, but without directly blaming anyone, not even the Andalusian Government. Subsequently, when he appeared as a popular accusation, he converted his complaint into a complaint that he directed against the two high-ranking officials and indirectly his hierarchical superiors in the Moreno Executive.
Among the requests made to the judge who opens proceedings, the proposal to request collaboration in the investigation of the Central Money Laundering and Anti-Corruption Investigation Brigade, the Central Economic and Fiscal Crime Unit of the General Commissariat of Judicial Police, stands out. and the judicial assistance of the General Intervention of the State Administration.
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