The entry of the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office in the trial against the Andalusian government for the handpicked allocation of almost 300 million euros to private clinics, on the basis of a law repealed after the pandemic, pushed Juan Manuel Moreno’s team to rethink the personification in the case.
“I have no opinion, it seems reasonable to me in any case,” replied the Andalusian president this Thursday, at the entrance to Parliament, when asked about the approach taken by the public prosecutor. Immediately afterwards, Moreno confirmed that they would “study” if the Andalusian government would appear in the trial opened by a Seville court for a possible crime of administrative prevarication in the abuse of emergency contracts that the Andalusian Health Service (SAS ) extended. without legal protection and against the explicit criteria of the Ministry of Finance, until June 2023.
The judicial investigation is based on a complaint filed by the Andalusian PSOE on June 20, supplemented twice by new documents. The Council and the PP become blind, they do not know the terms of the complaint, against whom the accusations are directed, if it is against the institution, if it is against specific senior officials and what crimes they are accused of . The socialists have revealed two: prevarication, which is currently the subject of the opening of a procedure by the judge, and embezzlement, which the magistrate has not examined for the moment, even if the evolution of the investigations provides other clues.
Moreno’s team publicly defends its calm, as the extensions of all contracts managed by SAS until 2023 are supported by legal reports from the Junta de Andalucía. The reports acknowledge that the legal framework put in place by the central government during the second state of alarm of the pandemic, including the royal decree-law that authorized communities to manually execute emergency contracts, “lost its validity at the time of its delivery. of this report. »
But they immediately add: “Despite everything [las prórrogas de los contratos firmadas por el SAS] They find their reason for being in the declaration of a pandemic by the World Health Organization on January 22, 2020, and in the “International Health Regulations”.
The 2020 investigation file
Despite the calm speech, in the entourage of the Andalusian president, voices are raised to defend the need to appear as soon as the judge presents this scenario to the Andalusian government, because now “we are going there blindly and the PSOE is beating us in strategy” .
Moreno arrived this Thursday at the control session in Parliament, 24 hours after the intervention of the Anti-Corruption in the legal process on contractual contracts. The President of the Council was ready for any of his political rivals – especially Juan Espadas – to attack him on this issue, but the socialist did not even speak about it.
Moreno had with him documents that he did not use, but which his office then distributed to the press: the prosecution of the Court of Auditors opened an ex officio investigation last September, after analyzing the report of audit of the Chamber of Accounts of Andalusia. on express contracts across the Council – not just within the SAS – during the 2020 financial year, the toughest year of the pandemic. On October 20, the procedure was filed.
This report from the parliamentary oversight body was published last July and analyzes, two years late, the Council’s public procurement in the most difficult course of the Covid-19 pandemic, during which legislation was authorized exceptionally so that all administrations have recourse to emergency contracts.
The PSOE’s complaint does not relate to the year 2020, but to the continuity of these hitchhiking contracts two and a half years later, when this regulation was repealed, in May 2021. Nor the evolution of the pandemic nor legislation to accelerate public administration hiring was the same in 2020 as in 2021.
Thus, the SAS Intervention Center published an unfavorable inspection report relating to the year 2021, accusing the Board of Directors of using a “totally repealed” state legal framework to continue to extend “without any justification” a contractual system “unduly”, while the pandemic was already “very moderate”. On July 31, the PSOE extended its complaint to the court that opened the procedure, including this report.
The Chamber of Accounts only analyzed the 2020 financial year, but included a brief annex on 2021 in which it already highlighted some of the irregularities that the PSOE was publicly denouncing at the time. elDiario.es published a few months ago that the Commission had extended contracts with private clinics for two years, worth 243 million euros, on the basis of a repealed decree law.
When the report of the Chamber of Accounts was made public, the socialists appeared before the press to emphasize that the conclusions of this document confirmed their complaints regarding “sanitary corruption in the Moreno government”, and they dared to say that it was “the tip of the iceberg.”
With the archives of the investigation opened by the Court of Auditors on this report, the Andalusian PP tried this Thursday to calm the so-called “scandal” denounced by the socialists, even if the legal file for prevarication remains open, and the Anti -Corruption is already part of the instruction.
Judge Francisco Javier Santamaría, who is investigating the case of contractual contracts against the Moreno government, has already requested documents on emergency contracts with private clinics from the General Intervention of the Government of Andalusia, from the Court of accounts and the Intervention Center of the Andalusian Health Service (SAS).
The Court of Auditors lacks relevant information on the period denounced by the PSOE, because its investigation focused only on the 2020 financial year – the last audit report published by the Chamber of Auditors of Andalusia – and does significant – hand-picked contracts. . after the repeal of the decree-law which protected them (May 2021) – correspond to the following year, which has not yet been analyzed by the Chamber of Auditors.
The anti-corruption prosecutor’s office, which has just resumed the investigation into contractual contracts, will have access to the documents requested by the judge leading the investigation. From now on, the prosecutor can encourage the magistrate to follow a specific line of inquiry, based on his own investigations, but it will be the court which will accept or reject his approach.
