On February 26, 2021, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, President of the Community of Madrid, visited Alcorcón. There he would inaugurate one of his great promises during the pandemic: a distance vocational training center, the IES Ignacio Ellacuría, with an initial budget of 500,000 euros and built in record time: nine months. It was one of the 30 star post-pandemic measures presented by the Government of the Community of Madrid in May 2020, at the height of the health crisis.
After touring its classrooms with Enrique Ossorio, then a councilor, and with the media and Telemadrid reporting on the event, Díaz Ayuso declared that it was a center “pioneer in Spain and reference for online education in our country”, a “hub” of first-rate technology and “climate neutral”, as the press services of the Puerta del Sol sold it.
What was not made public at the time was that it was a center built in an opaque and illegal manner, since the government of the Community of Madrid circumvented all controls and the law on public sector contracts, splitting invoices and orchestrating a system of transferring funds to another institute so that the work could be done outside the radar of the Intervention and economic control. Thus, there are now in Madrid at least eight cases of educational centers built with split contracts, a practice that the Public Prosecutor’s Office is investigating and that falls under the criminal category of crimes of corruption and prevarication.
Instead of submitting Ignacio Ellacuría’s work to a public tender, as required by law if the cost exceeds 40,000 euros plus VAT, the Ministry of Education decided to upgrade its flagship project by hand-picking the companies that would carry it out and cutting contracts and invoices, as if they were not part of the same job: on one side the painting invoices, on the other the windows invoices, on the other the bathrooms… Until it exceeded half a million euros.
In this way, economic controls were circumvented and there was no independent procurement table that objectively chose the most advantageous offer (technically and economically) for the interests of citizens, as legal imperatives do in public works of a certain magnitude.
As some of the experts consulted explain, the splitting of contracts, in addition to being an irregularity and a possible crime, always leaves room for opacity and multiplies the possibilities of corruption. Why this was done systematically in this case and in seven other cases, in exchange for what or who benefited, is not yet known, since the Ministry of Education has not answered this question. The prosecutor’s office, which is investigating two of these centers, has not made public any conclusions in this regard either.
But, in addition, to finance the work in a newly created building that did not yet have a CIF, the Ayuso government orchestrated a system of income and payments that consisted of moving public money between the centers. As elDiario.es was able to confirm, more than 200,000 euros were paid to the Luis Buñuel Institute in Móstoles from the accounts of the Ministry of Education as if the amount was intended for them. Then, the center was ordered to pay the invoices of the construction companies that were building the FP building in Alcorcón. When it had its own legal personality, it assumed the payments on its own accounts until the entire work was paid for through split invoices.
Only minor contracts
elDiario.es has confirmed that on the contracts portal – the place where all public tenders and small administration contracts should be posted – there are no files or competitions from this centre. There are only three contracts for works under 40,000 euros at the time of construction of the Ignacio Ellacuría.
Two of them, although billed by different companies, belong to the same owner who, when contacted by elDiario.es, admits to having carried out work there but refuses to give more details and refers to the center itself, which refers to the ministry. The Transparency Portal, whose operation Ayuso has modified to have greater control over it, has also not provided elDiario.es with the requested contracts, claiming that they are suspended, even though they are not. The management of Ignacio Ellacuría – which has just stopped completely after Education reversed its re-election project – has also not responded to calls from elDiario.es.
Sources close to the functioning of Education and these cases report that it was the deputy director of FP at the time, Alfonso Mateos, who gave the order to execute the embezzlement and the payment plan between Móstoles and Alcorcón. He is also the reference person for the directors of the centers that carried out works and that turned out to be illegal, as elDiario.es was able to confirm in written documentation.
Mateos was dismissed in March of this year, after the case of contract splitting came to light. This happened after a contractor who had not invoiced one of his works sent burofaxes to the Ministry and reported the case of a center worth more than two million euros built without a public tender in the Ciudad Escolar educational macro-complex. After numerous complaints from this businessman, Education opened an investigation and forwarded the file to the Public Prosecutor’s Office after finding signs of a crime.
He also fired Mateos, whom he points out as the person responsible for the plot. However, neither Mateos nor the directors of the institute (responsible teachers) were able to draw up financing and construction plans for works in eight centers spread across four different territorial areas, because they are not competent in technical matters nor able to decide on the finances and financing of the centers, but they manage what they receive. In fact, one of the eight centers that shared the contracts revealed by elDiario.es is not even FP and did not depend on Mateos’ subdirectorate.
Political leaders
The ministry was then headed by Enrique Ossorio – today president of the Madrid Assembly. His number two was Rocío Albert, today Minister of Economy and Finance, who made decisions on education policy. Neither of them answers questions from this media outlet or the reasons why the split contracts were chosen.
Another of the people who appears as a reference for the Ignacio Ellacuría Distance FP project is Manuel Bautista, now mayor of Móstoles and a member of Ayuso’s hard core within the PP of Madrid. In 2020, he was the general director of Concerted Education and was the one who gave the details of the project, as some press articles of the time point out.
The parliamentary group Más Madrid requested an extraordinary plenary session in July so that the current councilor, Emilio Viciana, could report on the case of the numerous breaches of contract and the PSOE filed a complaint with the prosecutor’s office to investigate, as the councilor Viciana himself already did after the first case was revealed. The extraordinary plenary session did not prosper due to the sole opposition of the PP, which has an absolute majority in an Assembly led by Ossorio himself. The Ministry of Education does not answer elDiario.es’ questions about the division, no matter how specific or repeated they may be.
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