The current Ministry of Education of Madrid, headed by Emilio Viciana, has taken to the Public Prosecutor’s Office all the cases published by elDiario.es regarding the works in vocational training centers that were carried out without tender, by hand and with cuts. -bills increased between the years 2021 and 2023. The branch councilor at the time was Enrique Ossorio, current president of the Assembly of Madrid, and the deputy councilor was Rocío Albert, now councilor of Economy and Finance to Isabel Díaz Ayuso.
The appeal to the Public Prosecutor’s Office was confirmed by the Director General of Human Resources for Education, Miguel José Zurita, of the Education Committee, in response to questions from the deputy of Más Madrid, Beatriz Borrás. Zurita defended that the current ministry has done what it had to, after Borrás reminded him that between the reforms and the newly built centers, there are already more than five million euros that have been spent without any control and in violation of the Public Sector Contracting Law.
To carry out work worth more than 40,000 euros, the administration must hold a call for tenders so that there is competition in the offers, so that an independent procurement table is also set up to choose the most suitable proposal, technically and economically. Then there are the controls and supervision of the Community intervention. None of this has happened in at least eight construction sites for which the minor contract formula has been used, which has practically no economic or financial control. You cannot even find the contracts on the purchasing portal.
Eight illegal works
“I receive the first file in January, it is opened, in March I have a response from the monitor and it is sent immediately to the prosecutor’s office.” Zurita refers to the first case known and published by elDiario.es, that of the construction of a vocational training center budgeted at 2.5 million euros in the Ciudad Escolar macrocomplex. As published by this media, the insistent complaints and burofaxes of the builder who was in charge of the project in 2021 alerted of this work without a file, without economic controls and that did not comply with all administrative procedures. The ministry then targeted two institute directors (although he is a character who does not have the capacity to make spending decisions) and dismissed the deputy director of FP, Alfonso Mateos.
After sending this file to the Prosecutor’s Office, elDiario.es published seven more – including many renovations that exceeded 40,000 euros, an art school in Alcalá for which 1.2 million were paid or the remote FP reference center promoted by the president of the Community of Madrid–. Now, Zurita confirms that all of them have been sent to the Prosecutor’s Office, given the evidence of a crime. The experts consulted point out that these actions would be part of the crime of prevarication: “I am a witness because I sent them, I expanded the actions and we sent these eight files to the Prosecutor’s Office, the Ministry has not hidden anything, it has been productive. Now it is in the hands of justice,” he replied to Borrás.
Although Education has attributed the radius of responsibility to the dismissed deputy director and the directors of the institute, elDiario.es has already published that there were high-ranking politicians who were aware of it, such as the director of the territorial area of the East. In the area of infrastructure, it was also known that there were large-scale works in Alcalá de Henares that had not been put out to tender. In addition, there are centers that have been built in this way in the territorial directorates of the East, West, Capital and South, one of the works was not even vocational training, but rather teacher training, which belongs to another department other than that of the dismissed deputy director. All the sources close to the file and the functioning of the ministry consulted agree that the responsibility for the money invested and the decision of who spent it, where and how exceeds the powers of the deputy director and the center directors, who are tenured teachers.
The PSOE of Madrid also denounced the case revealed by elDiario.es and Más Madrid requested the appearance of Viciana in July, which did not happen because it was blocked by the PP, majority in the Chamber. This Wednesday, in the Finance Commission, the party led by Manuela Bergerot will question the contracts again and will request that the Chamber of Accounts, now chaired by Joaquín Leguina at the request of Díaz Ayuso, supervise the affected centers.
