The constructed area of the Doctor Negrín Public Hospital in Gran Canaria exceeds 220,000 square metres. Its three main blocks and eight floors house more than 700 beds. 76 workers are responsible for the maintenance of these facilities, as well as their green areas, commercial premises and car parks. The service is outsourced. Since September 1, 2023, more than a year ago, it has been assumed by the company Plaza Sistemas under a minor contract that, in principle, had a duration of only one day and an amount of 9,656.05 euros (taxes included).
The law stipulates that minor service contracts cannot be extended or exceed a period of one year or a value greater than 15,000 euros. With the daily cost set in the contract, the expenditure over these twelve months would exceed three and a half million euros. Plaza Sistemas has not participated in any competition. It received a direct invitation to tender after the Ministry of Health terminated the contract with the previous winner, Ingemont Technologies, which had stopped paying its staff and covering their replacements.
Despite the time that has passed since the contract with Ingemont was resolved, the rules of the new competition have not yet been published. The management of the Doctor Negrín Hospital in Gran Canaria informed this newspaper at the end of July that it was working to “finalise its publication”. The same sources explain that Plaza Sistemas has “temporarily” taken over a service that is operating “normally” and that the hospital’s priority has been to “protect workers and their families, also maintaining the service according to the needs of patients”. , avoiding giving more details on a file that was processed in less than a month during the change of government in the Canary Islands (July-August 2023) after the departure of the progressive quadripartite (made up of the PSOE, NC, Yes Podemos and the Socialist Group of Gomera) and the arrival of the CC and the PP.
The minor one-day contract was formalized on August 11 of last year. It was signed by the pulmonologist and former PP deputy Miguel Ángel Ponce, who had taken office as director of the hospital ten days before, and by Fernando Sánchez, general director of Plaza Sistemas. This businessman, along with Ioan Fatu, the entrepreneur’s business development director, were linked to the previous successful bidder, Ingemont Technologies.
Two months before signing this small contract, the head of the maintenance department of the public hospital of Gran Canaria had published a report warning of the non-compliance of Ingemont, the company that had been providing the service since October 2021 after winning a call for tenders for which three other companies were presented (Eulen, Ferrovial Servicios and Tecnocontrol). The amount of this award was close to 6.5 million euros and the duration of the contract was 36 months.
In this report, dated June 13, 2023, the head of the department warned that the company did not cover replacements and had not paid the salaries of its workers for months. The lack of rotating staff was conditioned by “the evolution of health tasks and the safety of patients and users”, since maintenance was not carried out “to the extent” necessary to “ensure the continuity of service and the sustainability of the facilities.” This represented a “violation of essential contractual obligations.” A week after this report, the interim Minister of Health, the socialist Blas Trujillo, began the resolution of this contract.
The expert sources in public procurement consulted by this newspaper explain that the law does not include a specific provision on how to act when a contract with these characteristics is resolved, but they point out that it is usual for several companies to be invited to provide the contracting service. . temporarily, normally to those who participated in the previous competition, and to speed up the procedures for publishing the rules of the new one.
According to the documentation that this media has had access to, the head of the Negrín Administrative Procurement Unit invited Plaza Sistemas on July 28, 2023, to submit a bid in five days to obtain the maintenance service. The company requested an extension of this deadline, which was granted, and a few days later it received confirmation of its choice. Of the companies that participated in the 2021 competition, only Eulen confirmed that it had also received an invitation.
The formula chosen by the hospital was the minor contract for one day and for a sum of just over 9,000 euros. For staff alone, the daily cost is 5,700 euros. The threshold for small service contracts is 15,000 euros. Thus, in just two days of service, this amount is exceeded, which has forced us to resort to other procedures, such as the one negotiated without publicity, which requires inviting three companies and is the one used to award the maintenance service a year earlier to the same company of the General Hospital of La Palma for almost half a million euros.
Minor service contracts cannot be extended. Nor can they last more than a year. However, just two days before Plaza Sistemas assumed the maintenance service of Negrín, the hospital director issued a new resolution modifying a clause of the contract to add a slogan that would allow it to be maintained until a competition is held, the basis of which remains unpublished. “The duration of the contract is from 01.09.23 to 01.09.23 and, in any case, until the formalization of the file that, having the same object of the contract, is currently in the preparation phase and cannot be extended,” he specifies. modification to which this newspaper had access after a request to the Transparency Portal.
The sources consulted explain that in these cases the so-called doctrine of unjust enrichment operates. The administration continues to pay the company despite the anomalies in the contract because it actually provides the service.
Disciplinary dismissal
When the maintenance contract was awarded to Ingemont in October 2021, businessman Ioan Fatu, a Romanian naval engineer who has been living in Spain for over thirty years and is also a professor at the University of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, played a crucial role. (ULPGC) and that from June 2020 to February 2022 he was Ingemont’s delegate in the Canary Islands and director of its hospital division. He was responsible for contact with public administrations.
Fatu was dismissed from Ingemont at the beginning of 2022. In a recent ruling, the Supreme Court confirmed that this was a legitimate dismissal for disciplinary reasons. The company attributes responsibility for a discrepancy of more than 60% in the gross operating margin of the work entrusted to Ingemont. The ruling states that the data provided by Fatu as the company’s manager in the Canary Islands and sole representative in public procurement “were far from reality”, which is why he failed to fulfill one of his main tasks, namely ensuring the accuracy of the accounts, and he had compromised the company’s assets and violated “the duties of good faith, fidelity and loyalty”.
During this stage, the management of the Negrín hospital even imposed a fine of 61,000 euros on the successful bidder for “partial non-compliance” with the contract, for not having delivered the requested documentation on legionella within the deadline.
In February 2022, a few days after leaving Ingemont, Fatu joined Plaza Sistemas, the current winner of the Negrín maintenance contract. Fernando Sánchez had taken the same path two months earlier. This Sevillian businessman had been appointed Production Director of Ingemont in the Canary Islands in March 2017 and Director of Business Development of the group in May 2020. His arrival at the Plaza group took place in December 2021. In the same month, he was appointed Solidarity Representative. . of Ingemont. With the power, therefore, to legally represent in commercial transactions, the signing of contracts and other agreements the company that, two months earlier, had obtained the Negrín maintenance service.
In the commercial records, Sánchez continued to appear as a joint and several representative of Ingemont, the former successful bidder, until the recent dissolution of the company, which went bankrupt in 2023. The revocation of this position is not recorded in the official bulletins. In statements to this newspaper, the businessman denies having been linked to this company after joining Plaza Sistemas and, therefore, on the dates on which the workers were not paid. He also denies having had any previous connection with the Negrín maintenance contract. He specifies that he had other responsibilities within Ingemont related to the works.
For his part, Fatu indicated that the conditions under which Plaza Sistema provides maintenance services to the Doctor Negrín Hospital in Gran Canaria and the General Hospital in La Palma, as well as the duration of the contract, were established by the administration and, in short, it was about providing the service “under similar conditions and with the same staff as that which had been provided until then.” There was no condition, he adds, of assuming the debts of the previous successful bidder. The businessman assures that Plaza Sistemas limited itself to submitting the requested offers and documentation after receiving an invitation.
The documentation relating to these awards does not appear on public procurement portals.
