Judge Javier Santamaría, who is investigating the emergency contracts of the Andalusian Health Service (SAS) between 2020 and 2024 for an alleged offense of prevarication, focused his first investigations on an agreement of the Governing Council of October 6, 2020 which replaced the prior inspection. by permanent financial control (a posteriori) specific for this type of contract with private clinics.
The magistrate and the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office asked the government of Juan Manuel Moreno for the file of this agreement, which is accompanied by a “justifying report” signed by the auditor general at the time, Amelia Martínez Sánchez, today holds the position of Deputy Minister of Tax Authorities. Martínez approved the withdrawal of the prior control of emergency contracts in the SAS without specific argument – he does not even connect it to the pandemic – and limited himself to emphasizing that “he considers it appropriate to update the list of expenses , organizations and services”. which modify their internal control system “in order to achieve greater agility and efficiency in management”.
The report does not include specific arguments in favor of ex post control of emergency SAS contracts, beyond a “general” consideration for all expenses linked to the agreement, which highlights confidence of the former auditor in the “degree of maturity or self-discipline”. management processes.
In this case, the management of SAS emergency contracts with private clinics was left in the hands of the man who was then general director of the contracting body, Miguel Ángel Guzmán, today accused by the judge in the case of investigation for alleged crimes of prevarication, alongside his two successors, Diego Vargas, and the current director of the SAS, Valle García. The three were summoned to court number 13 to learn their rights and will be expected to testify in the coming days.
Seven months after the pandemic
The Andalusian Executive approved the agreement that removes prior control of SAS emergency contracts seven months after the official declaration of the Covid-19 pandemic. At that time, Andalusia had 74,766 cumulative infections and 1,956 deaths. Until then, the SAS’s own contracts with private clinics – without advertising or competition – required prior control by the Intervention of the Council, which had to authorize them before the release of the money.
The government agreement modified this control system for a more agile system: “an annual compliance audit”, that is to say that the auditors would then verify that the emergency contracts were concluded in accordance with the legislation in force and record it in a final report. , two years after hiring.
These subsequent reports from the SAS Intervention Center and its eight provincial auditors are the ones that reveal irregularities in emergency contracts in 2021, 2022 and 2023. They censure the “abuse” of the hand award “while the pandemic was already very strong”. “tempered” and denounce that they lacked legal anchoring, since the exceptional legislation that the central government allowed at the height of the pandemic to accelerate the response of administrations to the health crisis had been repealed in May 2021.
These reports from the control body are those which amplified the PSOE complaint, which gave rise to the opening of a judicial investigation for possible administrative wait-and-see actions. The Socialists denounce that the agreement of the Governing Council of October 6, 2020 is essential, because it withdraws prior control as part of the “plan” to set up a “parallel system” of contracting private clinics.
This document is the one that the socialists use to extend their complaint from the offices of the SAS to the Governing Council itself because, they say, “it seems obvious that it is not possible to keep alive a parallel system of markets public for two and a half years. years, for more than 240 million euros, without the full knowledge, consent and assent of the highest levels of the government of the Junta de Andalucía.
From auditor to deputy minister of the Treasury
Among the documents that the judge in charge of the case and the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office requested from the Council is the file of this agreement, signed by the Minister of the Treasury at the time – now deputy secretary general of the PP -, Juan Well done, and signed by President Moreno himself. The agreement includes a list of expenditures, bodies and services of the Andalusian Government which are then audited by the Intervention, including specifically the emergency contracts of the SAS, to accelerate the attributions by hand.
However, the Council’s general intervention report which accompanies the agreement does not include a specific justification for why prior checking on SAS emergency contracts is being withdrawn. The auditor who signed the report – who would be appointed deputy advisor two years later – did not even mention the need to speed up procedures in the face of the health crisis caused by the pandemic, an argument that the Council would later use to defend itself . “unfavorable” reports of board intervention, now with another owner at the helm.
This is the only hypothesis in the list of new expenditure, bodies and services of the Council which replace prior control with permanent control which lacks specific justification in the report attached to the agreement file. Martínez subscribes to the Council’s decision for all expenses related to the annex to the agreement, always “in general terms”.
“In general, for all, it must be said that the principle of universality or generality which characterizes prior control, consisting of a prior control with a suspensive nature of all acts subject to control, is not the most appropriate in these cases. where, due to massive management systems, due to the degree of maturity or self-discipline of management processes or, simply, due to the timing of its action or due to the limited scope of its conclusions, the control system becomes a parallel action of little added value which sometimes Its only effect is to slow down management,” we can read in the report.
Based on this argument, the control body concludes that it is “more appropriate, in order to optimize the resources available to the General Intervention of the Junta de Andalucía, without reducing control actions and based on risks detected in previous years, permanent financial control measures in certain personnel expenses, in remuneration expenses as well as in the subsidy lines included in this Agreement. SAS emergency contracts are not mentioned here.
The inclusion of this type of contract in the list of expenses which are audited a posteriori, under the assumption that any “particularly relevant exception” will be detected a posteriori by the Intervention and corrected by the Administration, comes up against unfavorable reports who would do it. end up elevating the internal control body to the rank of Ministry of Finance.
“Without justification” in the face of a “very moderate” pandemic
In the final reports monitoring compliance with the regulations applicable in emergency treatment files relating to the years 2021, 2022 and 2023, presented by this newspaper, the SAS Intervention Center blames the Council for “inappropriate” use of this type of contract. a year after the impact of the health crisis, he emphasizes that such a decision has “no justification” because since May 2021, “the pandemic was already very strong”. temperate”, and because it was more “predictable” than in 2020, therefore “they should have already been contracted according to the ordinary procedure”.
But above all because at that time, emergency contracts did not have the same legal anchoring as in 2020, since the exceptional legislation which allowed the central government, at the height of the pandemic, to accelerate the response administrations to the health crisis. was repealed in May 2021.
The SAS continued to “abuse” this hand-picked allocation system – with which it distributed 300 million to private clinics in 2021 alone – even after receiving written instructions from the Public Procurement Advisory Council of the ‘State and the SAS itself, warning. that at that time, the “recourse to emergency contracts” aimed at “dealing with COVID-19” had to have “an exceptional and residual nature”.
The PSOE attached to its complaint all these intervention reports, which are in the possession of the judge and the prosecutor, in an attempt to demonstrate that the premise used by the Government Council when replacing the prior inspection with permanent financial control for SAS emergency response contracts was “uncertain”. “The self-discipline” of the SAS leaders was conspicuous by its absence, as demonstrated by “their accusation in the affair and the repeated warnings of those involved in their reports”, socialist sources warn.
The team of Juan Espadas, secretary general of the PSOE-A, maintains that although this change in the inspection model was justified in October 2020, upon receipt of the first report of the Intervention contrary to “abuse” emergency contracts in the SAS during In 2021, “they should have rectified or, at least, reconsidered whether these controls were working”.
Socialists denounce prevarication, embezzlement, falsification of documents and membership in a criminal organization. The Andalusian Parliament will debate in this week’s plenary session precisely on the Council’s intervention reports on emergency SAS contracts between 2020 and 2024, based on requests for appearance from the Governing Council that the PSOE, Vox and PP recorded.
The socialists demanded the appearance of the Minister of the Treasury, Carolina España, to whose department the general intervention of the Council is attached, but the President of the House, Jesús Aguirre, left in the hands of the executive Moreno the power to decide which advisor answers the opposition’s questions.
