Alfonso Rueda places himself outside the 272 contractual contracts that the company owned by the brother of Beatriz Cuíña, general secretary of the Presidency and his right-hand man of the Xunta de Galicia, has accumulated between 2018 and 2024. Joaquín Cuíña invoiced a total of 782,666.5 euros for the management of trademark registrations of the regional administration. The Galician president assures that the decision is the responsibility of each of the departments that have needs in this area and he does not know to whom the orders are given: “I absolutely do not know with whom each contracts.”
The president of the In response to questions about the information revealed exclusively by elDiario.es, Rueda said that the use of minor contracts and awards without the need for a tender – i.e. -say manually – has been “common for many years”.
As proof of the normality and transparency that he attributes to the process, he highlighted that the information appears on the Xunta contractual platform. The task, however, is not so immediate. The search is difficult because the portal is designed for the opposite of what it proclaims: it does not allow requests by NIF, it requires reviewing one by one the management centers which govern these small objects up to 15,000 euros , it only offers data from the last quarters and prevents the export of the information obtained for processing.
Minor contracts, Rueda insisted, are “absolutely supervised” by the Consello de Contas and by the Intervention Xeral de la Xunta itself. The procedure is, according to the Galician president, “completely normal, transparent and supervised” and each department orders trademark registrations according to its needs.
Rueda did not clarify the reason for the accumulation of formalized contracts with Gallaecia Patentes y Marcas, Joaquín Cuíña’s company, nor the reason for the difference with the rest of the companies that manage these archives for Xunta. The nine others with whom the Galician government says it has worked together total just over 155,000 euros over the same period from 2018 to 2024.
This information led the opposition parties to announce that they would request explanations from the commission of inquiry that has just been created in the Parliament of Galicia – promoted by the BNG – to address issues such as the additional cost of Álvaro Cunqueiro Hospital in Vigo. and Xunta’s contracts with Eulen, the company in which Alberto Núñez Feijóo’s sister, Micaela Núñez Feijóo, is director for the northwest. Rueda also avoided saying whether the party she chairs, the Galician PP, which has reserved control of the commission, will allow Beatriz Cuíña to give explanations in this scenario.
Instead, he took advantage of the affair to point out to the BNG and the PSdeG: “Let them refine [la comisión] as soon as possible and make it operational. He especially criticized the nationalist formation: “It is one more example that the desire of the BNG to create this commission then transformed into a very clear ignorance of what it should do.”
