The commission of inquiry into the contract defended that the orders complied with the law, without however going into details or developing the explanations. He also said he was “proud” of the decision that the Vigo health center was built using a privatization formula that cost 470 million euros more than a traditional public works tender.
Rueda, who recalled that he was a member of all Feijóo’s cabinets in the Xunta, and that he therefore personally experienced the Cunqueiro process, insisted on the idea, repeated by all former senior officials of the governments of the PPs who went through the commission, that it was a “lean time” and public-private collaboration was “the way” to build the new infrastructure. “I come here to say that I am proud of this decision and that it could be built,” he said. The model chosen by Feijóo in 2010 consisted of entrusting the work to a company – in reality, a temporary union of several -, which assumed the financing in exchange for a fee of one million dollars that the Galician government would continue to pay each year. until the middle of the next decade. This formula also implied a concession of almost all non-clinical services, not only in the new hospital, but also in Nicolás Peña and Meixoeiro. The Consello de Contas audit report concluded that it would have been cheaper to undertake the project using public funds for the works, on the one hand, with the traditional system, and, on the other hand, for services.
To begin his intervention in a commission that the PP tried to make difficult – it voted against its creation then kept control of it and vetoed appearances like that of Feijóo -, Rueda considered that the state of the body of inquiry is “between liquid and gaseous” and has become “something that even its promoters cannot define”. Beyond defending the legality of all orders from the pandemic or the accumulation of minor contracts with Eulen, the company in which Micaela Núñez Feijóo, sister of the president of the PP, is director for the northwest, did not provide further details on the processes. He repeatedly referred to the Spanish political situation, while ensuring that he would not become “complicit” in the transfer of his “toxicity” to the Galician Parliament. “Here there were neither ‘koldos’ nor ‘aldamas’; This happened within the Spanish government,” he said.
The president of the Xunta accused the opposition of lighting “the torches of the inquisition on everything that the Galician government does and invoked the argument that, for example, Eulen also makes contracts with other governments , not all from the PP, and even He did it with the bipartisan PSdeG-BNG which led the Xunta between 2005 and 2009.
“I want to locate him: he is in the Parliament of Galicia, not in Madrid,” replied the leader of the BNG, Ana Pontón, who was indignant that he did not answer the questions she asked him and interpreted his silence as “an admission” that the PP “has been using the areas of opacity in public procurement for the benefit of family businesses for 15 years.” The 1,573 contracts of 7 million euros awarded to Eulen between 2018 and 2024 that the BNG accounts for are, according to its national spokesperson, a “demonstration of fraudulent use” of minor contracts.
The leader of the PSdeG, Xosé Ramón Gómez Besteiro, estimated that “these are not isolated cases, there is a modus operandi” in the Xunta for the benefit of companies linked to the PP. He cited, like Pontón, the cases of Universal Support, linked to Feijóo’s brother-in-law; that of Eulene; that of the company in which the husband of the number two of the Galician PP is associated; or that of the signature of the brother of the Secretary General of the Presidency. This “clear model” of the Xunta, according to Besteiro, was also reflected in the model chosen for Álvaro Cunqueiro. He defended that the bipartisan had left a public project “signed, projected and budgeted”, but Feijóo modified it. He asked Rueda why they had adopted “so enthusiastically” an alternative that turned out to be more expensive and offered a smaller hospital.
