Second filing of alleged irregularities in the awarding of some contracts within the Parliament of Andalusia. The Seville Prosecutor’s Office has archived the procedure opened to investigate a complaint against the lead lawyer, the head of the IT department and other officials of the Autonomous Chamber for an alleged “deception” to the Prosecutor’s Office itself by justifying some sentences. The filing decree considers that there is no indication of criminal offence or anomaly in two contracts awarded by the Parliament of Andalusia with an IT company for a total amount of 350,000 euros.
The Anti-Money Laundering and Corruption Group of the Superior Police Headquarters of Western Andalusia has been investigating the complaint for several months, at the request of the Seville Prosecutor’s Office, which now invites the plaintiffs, previously active officials of the Parliament of Andalusia, to go to court if they insist that some type of irregularity has occurred and merits a criminal charge.
The Special Prosecutor’s Office against Corruption and Organized Crime had referred the matter to the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Seville in October 2023. The complaint was closely linked to an investigation procedure, also opened by the Public Prosecutor’s Office of Seville in July 2023, for allegations of irregularities in public procurement. How the main report that motivated the case concerning the most lucrative contract negotiated without publicity, for 263,000 euros, was prepared and managed is what the police and the Public Prosecutor’s Office itself are now trying to determine, despite the fact that this detailed double complaint, mainly of a technical nature, has ended up being archived.
Updated source code
According to the complainants, in this case the Board of Directors approved the direct award to Guadaltel in a negotiated procedure without publicity due to an alleged lack of competition for technical reasons, given that the applications subject to this contract had already been developed by Guadaltel and was the only company to know the updated source code of the Parliament. Although the complainants claimed that the source code was accessible to all, the Public Prosecutor’s Office maintains that the said company was the only one to have declared an updated source code.
As already confirmed by parliamentary sources, seven employees of the IT department prepared a report without the Chamber requesting it. This report proved decisive for the prosecutor’s office to abandon the investigation in the first instance. As the plaintiffs had warned, the Seville prosecutor’s office had “falsely” closed the investigation, “passing off as independent reports from the accused’s entourage” in the first instance, that is, from the head of the IT department.
When the case was first filed, the prosecutor considered that these reports were “issued by public officials whose services are provided in this specific area and whose actions leave no doubt in the procedure.” But both the fact that “all the signatories” had “a hierarchical and direct dependence” on the IT manager and the way in which the events unfolded, detailed in the new complaint, led them to present another document to the prosecutor’s office, which was re-filed.
