All the opposition parliamentary groups went for the jugular of the president of the Commission, Juan Manuel Moreno, this Thursday, a few hours after a court in Seville opened an investigation against the Andalusian Health Service (SAS) over the handpicked allocation of 243 people. million to private clinics within the legal framework of the pandemic when it was already repealed.
This is the first time in the six years since Moreno has been in power that his rivals have managed to twist his face, put him on the defensive and shake him out of his usual angry grin until he loses his temper and gets angry with his interlocutors. Parliament. A typical government oversight session.
Moreno came with a speech prepared to refute the intervention reports, revealed Tuesday by elDiario.es, which accuse the Board of Directors of awarding 458 million euros to the hand, sharing hundreds of minor contracts “in fraud of the law.” The auditors gave the SAS until December to demonstrate that these “serious deficiencies” have been corrected, that they “violate the legislation”, otherwise they will present an action report, a sort of code red for the organization control when it detects criminal signs. .
After 48 hours of silence, the Andalusian president read in Parliament the same statement that the Junta made on Tuesday after the news was published: “It is false that the SAS granted 458 million in legal fraud. No report says it, no auditor says it, no Chamber of Auditors, no one. But what he has not prepared is a response to the first legal case that fully affects his government, putting almost 300 million contractual contracts under suspicion between 2021 and 2023.
The plenary hall was drowned out by the loud murmur of opposition deputies. The first face to face with the president, the deputy of the mixed group Adelante Andalucía, José Ignacio García, understood that Moreno had not denied the existence of a “fraud of the law” denounced by the auditors of the Council, but that the irregularities did not cover all the small contracts of 2021, which represented 27% of the contracts signed by the SAS in Cádiz, Huelva, Córdoba and Jaén.
“You did not say that there was no fraud in the law, you said that the fraud is not the 450 million, can it be 400 million,” García asked him , in a very harsh intervention: “You and your government are already in the courts. Whose fault? Puigdemont, Sánchez, the Catalans? “They want to cover up the SAS plot and that is called corruption.”
Moreno accused him of “putting on a show”, which is “the only alternative a small party has”, but immediately afterwards he received the same virulence in the intervention of the coalition spokesperson Por Andalucía (the brand of Sumar), Inmaculada. Nieto: “It’s corruption, it’s political corruption,” Nieto insisted, while recalling that to this day the SAS continues to manually allocate allocations to private health care – in February 120 million euros – according to the formula of the negotiated contract. without advertising.
The leader of the Andalusian PP has demonstrated, during these six years of presidency, a great ability to dodge the arrows of his adversaries every 15 days in Parliament. The control sessions always showed more tension and nervousness among the opposition spokesmen than among the leader, who showed temperance, which made it possible to obtain a solid absolute majority of 58 deputies during of this legislature. But that’s not what happened today.
Moreno appeared tense, uncomfortable and aggressive in the first responses to the two left formations, and regained some composure when it came the turn of Vox, whose preferred line of attack is the so-called lack of virulence of the Junta with the government of Pedro Sánchez.
Hard counterattack with newspaper archives and budgets
The President of the Council had an ace up his sleeve, a significant announcement which generally does not wait until the end to eclipse the interventions of his four interlocutors. This time he could not wait beyond the second face-to-face and, in response to Inmaculada Nieto’s criticism of cherry-picked contracts in the health sector, Moreno announced a significant injection of money for education.
Nursery schools, former daycare centers, will be free for children aged 2 to 3 from next year, a measure that will benefit some 67,000 families, that is to say those who, due to an income above the threshold set by the Ministry of Education. The development pays the public price of the premises because they are not subsidized.
It is a strategic bet which, however, is difficult to dissociate from the political moment which is besieging the Andalusian government. A week ago, the Ministry of Education had to distribute between seven communities – four from the PP and three from the PSOE – the millions of euros to create 12,000 public and free nursery places which Andalusia has given up, because that it distorted its place bonus model. in private and subsidized daycare centers (set up 30 years ago by socialist governments).
Also a week ago, Moreno took advantage of a meeting with the Third Sector at the San Telmo Palace to announce, in the middle of a debate on regional financing following the fiscal pact for Catalonia between the PSOE and the Catalan separatists, that “Andalusia is at the limit of its financial capacity” in terms of public services. Since then, the President of the Council has announced a new tax reduction for the purchase and rental of housing for young people and, now, free nursery schools for pupils aged two to three.
The most brutal clash took place between the president and the leader of the opposition, the socialist Juan Espadas, who carried with him a copy of the SAS intervention reports and read the harshest conclusions: minor contracts ” in fraud of the law”; “The legally established procedure for awarding contracts for works, goods and services has been totally and absolutely abolished, thereby dividing the subject matter of the contracts.” This is the first face-to-face in which Espadas, in addition to the media complaints, comes reinforced by the recent opening of a procedure by a judge for these same complaints filed more than a year ago.
“You hindered this investigation as much as you could. “It torpedoed the work of the opposition,” he said, after denying that the Moreno government provided him with 68 auditors’ reports, as he claims these days.
“Go to court!”
But Moreno expected a muscular counterattack with Espadas: the Andalusian president dusted off the small contracts awarded by the SAS in 2018, the last year of the PSOE government: “791 million small contracts in 2018. And there are no didn’t have a pandemic. And it was the usual thing,” the popular leader emphasized, before reading the conclusions of a report of the Intervention of that year, with the same textual formula that Espadas had previously read about the SAS audits in 2021: “This was completely dispensed and absolutely the procedure…”
The popular bench, until then with serious faces, burst into joy and applause, as if the champagne had been popped at a party: “Go to court, go to court!”, the councilor of the presidency, Antonio Sanz. from the open microphone at Moreno’s headquarters: “Are you going to denounce Susana Díaz and her former colleagues for these 791 million? For consistency, you should do this immediately. “Are you going to say that the PSOE distributed money illegally?” asked Moreno.
The president continued to brandish an arsenal of newspaper archives against his rival, citing small contracts signed by the Ministry of the Environment, when Espadas was at its head, and by the Seville City Hall in 2016, when he was mayor. “96% of his department’s contracts were minor and nine out of ten City Hall contracts in 2016 were minor. When you were mayor, these types of contracts increased by 4,000%,” he said to end his speech. The 58 deputies of the PP and all the members of the Executive stood up to applaud. “Why didn’t I bid?” “Why didn’t you put out a call for tenders?” Sanz could be heard speaking from the president’s open microphone.
Espadas avoided all these comments. “Small contracts are not illegal, it is the fragmentation of million-dollar contracts into small contracts that the auditors are pointing out,” insisted the socialist leader. Moreno accused him of “trying to criminalize and confuse an emergency situation in health care”, the only veiled reference to the investigation opened by the courts against emergency contracts with private clinics signed by the SAS with the legal framework for the pandemic already repealed, between 2021 and 2023.
