Catalina García has been the Minister of Sustainability and Environment of the Junta de Andalucía since July 29, but between January 2019 and that date she held the Vice-Ministry of Health, until July 2022. So, at the start of her second term, Juan Manuel Moreno elevated her to head of that department. The judicial investigation into the emergency health contracts signed by the Board (between 2021 and 2023) at the request of a complaint from the PSOE-A is focused on that period of time. And in those years there are also 18 unfavorable reports from the Intervention on the bulk of the hiring carried out in 2020 and 2021 both by the general headquarters of the Andalusian Health Service and by the centers of the eight provinces. However, García dissociated himself from those decisions this Thursday. “I am sure that the people who managed those moments did so out of an extraordinary need,” she stated.
The counselor had been asked during an interview on the program Canal Sur Radio The Morning of Andalusia about whether she was concerned, in her capacity as deputy minister (under the orders of Jesús Aguirre, current president of the regional Parliament) and Minister of Health, about the complaint by the PSOE of Andalusia for the splitting of invoices during the period of the pandemic, that is , in 2020 and 2021. García has referred exclusively to the contracts carried out by the provincial purchasing centers that, in 2021, as EL PAÍS revealed, awarded 1,223 million euros in minor contracts, which do not require competitive competition or advertising . Of these, 92% presented “irregularities”, according to the Intervention, the majority due to dividing million-dollar awards between the same companies.
The oversight body of the Junta de Andalucía also found incidents in 76.3% of normalized contracting, the rest of ordinary contracts signed by the provincial centers, among which are emergency contracts – which are also carried out outside of the advertising and competitive competition criteria―, which are the ones on which the majority of non-compliance found in the reports focus.
García has insisted that these provincial platforms “what they did was solve the problems and ensure that the most necessary materials were in the health centers.” “We don’t remember now, but then the complaint was not having masks, equipment,” he insisted, alluding to the covid-19 pandemic and following one of the lines of argument of the Andalusian Government to minimize the scope of the irregularities reported by the intervention and that affect the bulk of all health contracting in those years. The former Minister of Health has also alluded to another of the defense axes of the Moreno Government: all contracts signed by the SAS centers “are made with legal reports” and the material that was acquired reached its destination. “We are not talking about nothing arriving,” he added.
The current Minister of the Environment has not referred at any time to her position as head and second of the Ministry when these purchases were made. The PSOE complaint, which has already reported that it will expand with the unfavorable reports of the Intervention carried out in the provincial purchasing centers, focuses on the almost 300 million that the Moreno Government awarded through emergency means and under the framework regulations that endorsed these express contracts due to the needs derived from covid-19, despite having been repealed. In its report on these 2021 awards, the supervisory body, as it does in the case of the audits of the provincial centers, questions whether the pandemic was invoked because by then it “was already very tempered.” In the case of the provincial centers, it is criticized that in many of them this emergency, to which the counselor alluded in the interview, was not justified or that the splitting of contracts had a purpose that “did not respond to unforeseen needs” so should have been foreseen and through other ordinary procedures.
The PSOE of Andalusia is going to request the appearance of the General Comptroller of the Junta and the SAS before the Health Commission of the Andalusian Parliament to clarify the irregularities detected in the 18 unfavorable reports that have been prepared so far. They give the managing bodies a period of six months to incorporate their recommendations on the non-compliance detected and, if they do not comply, it may lead to the issuance of an action report, which is indicative of evidence of possible criminal elements.
Sources from the Ministry of Economy and Finance, on which the Intervention depends, are not very concerned about the criminal consequences of unfavorable reports from their supervisory body. They understand that since none of their audits have concluded the existence of impairment of funds, which implies the obligation to open proceedings immediately, non-compliance does not have any further implications.