Former Minister of Health Julio García Comesaña, who took office in September 2020, justified that the Xunta had hired the company alone, Ignacio Cárdenas, brother-in-law of Alberto Núñez Feijóo -then president of the Galician government-, is . commercial director to take charge of follow-up tasks as he worked with Samur in Madrid. It was, he defended, a “management experience in another community”. He said this during the first day of appearance before the commission of inquiry into Galician government contracts during the pandemic, with companies in which there are management positions linked to Feijóo and on the construction of the Álvaro Hospital Cunqueiro in Vigo with an additional cost of 470 million euros.
The firm is Universal Support, integrated into Konecta, and is dedicated to telemarketing. The decision, explained Comesaña, was taken on the first weekend of the state of alarm by the clinical committee created by the Xunta to monitor the health crisis. There it was established that it was necessary to manage the calls because the volume exceeded the capacity of 061 and “it was decided to look for a company in the telephony field”.
Comesaña, now a PP deputy in the Galician Parliament, defended that knowledge of public health is not necessary to carry out health monitoring like that of the pandemic. “There is a difference between who acts as a teleoperator and what is behind it; no need for technical solvency [en materia sanitaria]”. This first weekend of the state of alarm, he said, a study was carried out among companies with knowledge in call management and it was at that time, after observing that Konecta was working with Samur, that it was decided to turn to the company in which Ignacio Cárdenas works. . It was a Saturday and the following Tuesday. “I had 75 people working,” he added. This hiring was done by emergency means. Then a competition was organized, with an “ordinary process in quotes”, in which the winner was also Universal Support in May 2021. In another competition in which she participated, she was not chosen, continued the former advisor.
PSdeG MP Patricia Iglesias, however, stressed that Universal Assistance had never previously contracted with the Galician Health Service (Sergas) and that the Consello de Contas considered that it “lacked the technical solvency to carry out monitoring”. He received, he said, 15 million contracts during the pandemic and wondered if “the motivation” was that one of his directors was the brother-in-law of the president of the Xunta. “Was it a coincidence or was it Feijóo’s decision? To find out, you would have to ask the Galician from Madrid,” he said, referring to the current president of the Spanish PP, whose appearance in this commission of inquiry was vetoed by the PP. “While people were dying, there were those who were in the offices looking to make a profit,” Iglesias said.
On behalf of the BNG, Luís Bará accused the PP of what he called “parliamentary obstruction” and accused it of wanting to “protect senior officials of the PP and their families who made money at one time of maximum health crisis”. “The PP goes above and beyond by mocking and insulting this commission,” he protested. The reason is that the documentation requested from the parliamentary body reached the deputies around 10 a.m. this Friday, a little over an hour before the start of the hearings. Both the Bloc and the PSdeG have severely criticized these delays which, according to them, do not allow them to do their work.
Previously, during the first appearance, which was that of the director of the Galician Infrastructure Agency, Francisco Menéndez, the socialist Elena Espinosa and the BNG deputy Óscar Ínsua had complained about the PP’s intention to transform the commission into “bet”. Those who appear will be those imposed by the PP, which excludes Feijóo or his sister, Micaela Núñez Feijóo, director of Eulen in the northwest. The schedule, which they considered rushed, did not allow them to consult the documentation before the first appearances and will postpone part of the work to the Christmas dates, which, according to Espinosa, will attract less public attention.
For their part, Comesaña and Menéndez used their interventions to criticize the Contas Consello report which estimated the additional cost of the Alvaro Cunqueiro at 470 million euros due to Feijóo’s decision to build it with a concessional model instead of finance it, as in the traditional system. , directly from the Xunta. Menéndez, in particular, assured that Contas’ analysis “has a flaw”, that is, it “does not adequately evaluate the context”, and explained that in times of economic crisis, financing was not possible otherwise. . If the model, which is a public-private collaboration, has not been taken up in other Galician hospitals and is not currently used, it is “because it is not necessary”.
