Barely two months after her appointment, the new Andalusian Minister of Health, Rocío Hernández Soto, appeared for the first time at the plenary session of Parliament, feeling overwhelmed by the news: the intervention reports which accuse the Board of Directors to select 458 million dollars distributing thousands of minor contracts “in fraud of the law”, published this week by elDiario.es, and the opening of legal proceedings against the 243 million contracts of emergency – without advertising or competition – that the Andalusian Health Service (SAS) has granted to individuals. clinics between 2021 and 2023 within the already repealed pandemic legal framework.
The new advisor spoke with a speech ready to respond to the controversy over split contracts, which has shaken the Moreno government since Tuesday, but the announcement of the first judicial investigation into the contracting system that the SAS extended until last year – and canceled after this newspaper revealed it – took her by surprise. The news, reported this morning by La Cadena Ser, left the Andalusian executive in the background, without response or prepared argument to defend itself from the flood of criticisms and accusations that the PSOE, promoter of the complaint before the courts, presented in Parliament on June 20.
The socialists chained up to five questions to the advisor denouncing that the Andalusian health system is “defective” and “outlawed”, and made the rounds of complaints against emergency contracts without a legal framework, from 2021 to 2023 , to the reports of the SAS auditors, who speak of “undue and massive splitting”. The latter completely upset the Moreno executive which, for the first time and in an unprecedented manner, reacted by disavowing the report of the internal control body, because “the sample of files analyzed is insignificant”, 0.19% of the 295,000 people surveyed. a selection of contracts carried out in 2021.
Among these files, there are hundreds of minor contracts linked to the same company for the purchase of the same medicine, cut into small pieces to “escape” the threshold set by law for a minor contract – between 15,000 and 30,000 euros – which, in the end, adds up to a millionaire figure. The main beneficiaries of this system have been the large pharmaceutical companies, such as Novartis, Pfizer, Janssen, Roche or Bayer, but SAS auditors also denounce the splitting of contracts “in violation of the law” for expansion and construction work. renovation of hospitals, for expenses on stationery, courier services, taxis, private security guards and even “Christmas decoration reform”, as this newspaper headlined on Wednesday.
The Minister of Health, with a distraught face and a very low tone of voice, defended herself from the accusations by constantly repeating the statement that the Council sent on Tuesday, after the publication of the news, “categorically denying that the contracts of minors violate the law”, as the four SAS Intervention reports in Cádiz, Huelva, Córdoba and Jaén warn But in one of his responses, without consulting the newspaper, he provides an important nuance: “It is categorically false that. ‘there are contracts that violate the law. “I’m talking about health, I’m not talking about Christmas lighting, I’m not going to talk about those things.”
The Moreno government denies that there is a “misappropriation of funds”, in response to complaints from the Intervention, which gave the SAS until December to respond with a report on the implementation of its recommendations which demonstrates that They “corrected” the “serious deficiencies” in the reports. If they do not do so, the monitoring body will submit an action report as soon as criminal signs are detected.
However, the Council did not deny the existence of irregularities in the large minor contracts concluded by SAS in 2021, which reached almost 27% of the contracts concluded that year. The Minister of Health, like the head of the Treasury, Carolina España, clings to the fact that contract recruitment became widespread a year after the pandemic because “the objective was to save lives”. But the use of these contracts for Christmas arrangements, taxis or masonry work in hospitals and health centers has put the nerves of the ministry to the test, which this Thursday in Parliament did not put the hand on fire for these hypotheses denounced by the speaker.
It was the PSOE deputy, Rafael Márquez, who opened fire this morning, during the first intervention of the plenary, in which he described the situation of the new Minister of Health as a “piece of paper”. “He dedicated himself to reading the role entrusted to him by those who set up this system of fraudulent contracts,” he said, pointing to the Speaker of the House, Jesús Aguirre, who was Minister of Health in 2021, when the first extensions were approved of emergency contracts with private clinics without legal basis.
“We went from optimizing health spending with the auction of medicines, when the PSOE governed, to giving money to pharmaceutical companies. It is normal that they are delighted with you, few things make you condescending”, said Márquez. The socialist deputy directly asked the advisor “how much money was embezzled” by “eliminating surveillance controls” to distribute contracts in hand, and recalled that, due to lack of publicity and competitive participation, the Council was not able to benefit from lower offers in public contracts which, he said, are on average 15 % compared to the initial price.
