Barely two months after her appointment, the new Andalusian Minister of Health, Rocío Hernández Soto, has appeared for the first time in the Plenary Session of Parliament, finding herself overwhelmed by current events: the Intervention reports that accuse the Board of hand-picking 458 million splitting thousands of minor contracts “in fraud of law”, published by elDiario.es this week, and the opening of court proceedings against the 243 million in emergency contracts – without advertising or competition – that the Andalusian Health Service (SAS) granted private clinics between 2021 and 2023 under the legal framework of the pandemic already repealed.
The new counselor took the stand with a speech prepared 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 contract contracting system that the SAS extended until last year – and canceled after this newspaper revealed it – has caught her off guard. The news, reported this morning by Cadena Ser, has left the Andalusian Executive on the back foot, with no response or prepared argument to defend itself from the stream of criticism and accusations that the PSOE, the promoter of the complaint in the courts, has brought to Parliament. last June 20.
The socialists have concatenated up to five questions to the counselor denouncing that the Andalusian health system is “flawed” and “outside the law”, and have taken a tour from the complaints against emergency contracts without a legal framework, from 2021 to 2023 , to the reports of the SAS auditors, which speak of “undue and massive fractionation.” The latter has completely upset the Moreno Executive who, for the first time and in an unprecedented manner, has reacted by disavowing the report of the internal oversight body, because “the sample of files analyzed is insignificant”, 0.19% of the 295,000 hand-picked contracts carried out in 2021.
Among these files, there are hundreds of minor contracts linked with the same company for the purchase of the same medicine, cut into small items to “evade” the threshold set by law for a minor contract – between 15,000 and 30,000 euros – which in the end add up. a millionaire figure. The main beneficiaries of this system were the large pharmaceutical companies, such as Novartis, Pfizer, Janssen, Roche or Bayer, but the SAS auditors also denounce that there was splitting of contracts “in fraud of law” for hospital expansion and renovation works, to 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, has defended herself against the accusations by repeating over and over again the statement that the Board sent on Tuesday, after the publication of the news, “flatly denying that the contracts minors are violating the law”, as the four reports of the SAS Intervention in Cádiz, Huelva, Córdoba and Jaén warn. But in one of his answers, without looking at the paper, he made a significant nuance: “It is flatly false that there are contracts that violate the law. “I talk about health, I don’t talk about Christmas lighting, I’m not going to get into those things.”
The Moreno Government is denying that there is “diversion of funds”, in response to the complaints of the Intervention, which has given the SAS until December to respond with a report on the implementation of its recommendations that demonstrates that they have “corrected” the “serious deficiencies” that the reports include. If they do not do so, the supervisory body will submit an action report upon detecting criminal signs.
However, the Board has not denied the existence of irregularities in the large minor contracting that the SAS made in 2021, which reached almost 27% of the contracts that were made that year. The Minister of Health, like the head of the Treasury, Carolina España, clings to the fact that contract hiring became widespread a year after the pandemic because the “objective was to save lives.” But the use of these contract contracts for Christmas arrangements, taxis or masonry work in hospitals and health centers has strained the nerves of the ministry, which this Thursday in Parliament has not put its hand on the fire for those assumptions denounced by the intervener.
The PSOE deputy, Rafael Márquez, is the one who opened fire this morning, in the first intervention of the Plenary, in which he described the situation of the new Minister of Health as “a piece of paper.” “He has dedicated himself to reading the role given to him by those who have implemented this fraudulent contracting system,” he said, pointing to the president of the Chamber, Jesús Aguirre, who was the Minister of Health in 2021, when the first extensions were approved. of emergency contracts with private clinics without legal anchor.
“We have gone 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 patronize you,” Márquez said. The socialist deputy has directly asked the counselor “how much money has been diverted” by “eliminating oversight controls” to distribute contracts by hand, and has recalled that, since there is no advertising or competitive participation, the Board has not been able to benefit from downward offers in public procurement which, on average, he said, is 15% compared to the original price.