The judge who is investigating the emergency contracts of the Andalusian Health Service (SAS) with private clinics between 2020 and 2023, based on a law repealed after the pandemic, cited the current director, Valle García, and his two predecessors as being under investigation. , Diego Vargas and Miguel Ángel Guzmán.
In an order advanced by the Cadena Ser and to which eldiario.es Andalucía had access, the investigating judge number 13 of Seville, Javier Santamaría, informed the three that they would be the subject of a judicial investigation regarding a possible crime of prevarication, following a complaint filed by the PSOE which denounces three other crimes: embezzlement, falsification of documents and membership in a criminal organization, the latter being punishable by a penalty of up to eight years in prison.
The socialists’ complaint directly points to two former senior officials of the Andalusian government, Miguel Ángel Guzmán, director of the SAS between November 2019 and July 2022; and his replacement, Diego Vargas, who served in this position until December 2023. Guzmán was promoted to vice minister of Health after the 2022 elections, but was removed from office five months later, after the lists exorbitant waiting times of patients for surgery were made public, which the Junta announced. hadn’t published in a year and a half.
Three months after his dismissal, Guzmán signed for private insurer Asisa, a company that had benefited from the cherry-picked allocation of 44 million euros in contracts that are currently under investigation by the justice. His replacement as head of the SAS was Diego Vargas, also accused, who was fired with him in December 2023.
The Council then signed with the current director, Valme García, who, upon her arrival, put aside the framework agreements with which they planned to return to open procurement, with advertising and competition, and recovered the price by hand with private clinics, this time. with the advertising-free negotiation formula, with which this year he distributed more than 120 million, 80% to the same six private hospital complexes which monopolized the hand-picked contracts between 2021 and 2023 which the judge is investigating.
The PSOE also questions the use of contracts negotiated without publicity but, without yet extending the complaint to these new hand-made attributions, it included on November 11 in its complaint the name of the current director of the SAS, who appears a day later as investigated in the case studied by Santamaría.
The magistrate summons the defendants “for any working day in the month of November in order to inform them of their rights and to inform them of the complaint”, without however fixing the day of their testimony before the court. In his self-documentation, Santamaría requested documents from the Court of Auditors, the General Intervention of the Junta de Andalucía and also the SAS. In this last province, the Andalusian Government requests the file approved by the Government Council on October 6, 2020, in which it replaces the prior inspection of certain health expenses, organs and services – including the controversial emergency contracts – with permanent financial control, i.e. ex post audits.
One of these audits of SAS Intervention, relating to the 2021 financial year, calls into question the emergency procedure when the pandemic was already “very moderate”, concludes that “there is no justification” for maintaining contracts by hand, and calls into question discretionary power. distribution of nearly 300 million euros between private clinics.
The judge notifies his order, in which he cites the last three SAS officials as being the subject of an investigation, to the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, which is already involved in the case and will have to position itself in relation to the offenses and the accused. indicated by the PSOE.
