The Health Minister, Rocio Hernandezhas once again denied that a “fraud of law” occurred in hiring of the Andalusian Health Service (SAS) due to the emergency procedure during the pandemic and has guaranteed that it is something “flatly false.” The demonstrations take place during his response to a question raised by the Socialist Group deputy Rafael Márquez in the plenary session of the Andalusian Parliament. This echoed the decision of the Court of Instruction number 13 of Seville to admit to processing the complaint of the PSOE-A for “alleged embezzlement and prevarication“in the awarding of around 300 million euros through health emergency contracts carried out by the exceptional procedure approved for the pandemic and which, according to the socialists, the SAS continued to use until 2023, “two years after its legal repeal.”
Márquez has considered it “very serious” that a court sees “indications of crime” in the hiring of the SAS, and has considered that both the president of the Board, Juanma Moreno, and the counselor herself They must give “a clear explanation” about what happened. He has also pointed out to the counselor that he only has “two paths” to choose from, which involve “looking the other way” regarding the “irregularities”, which is what, according to the socialist deputy, Moreno has chosen to do, or or the one who would choose “any decent public servant, who, in the face of any known irregularity, proceeds to purge responsibilities, whoever falls.”
“It depends on you which path you are going to choose,” Rafael Márquez pointed out to the counselor, to whom, during his questioning, he indicated that “There are many technicians” in his department who “see with true astonishment not only the deterioration of public health, but also the seriousness of the contracting system carried out by his Ministry”and has urged Rocío Hernández to say “what opinion do you have of the implementation of a system of contracting by hand, without transparency, without competition, without advertising, maintained over the years, which derives millions of euros, until now that we know 758 million under suspicion from public health to private health.
Likewise, he asked the counselor if, after the aforementioned admission for processing of the socialist complaint, “she is going to give immediately or has already given instructions to abandon this opaque, irregular contracting system“, or if “she is going to follow the roadmap previously set by the political party that appointed her advisor”, in reference to the PP.
Intervention reports
The representative of the PSOE-A has referred to the “destroying” report from the Chamber of Accounts of Andalusia known “at the end of July” about the SAS emergency contracts that “confirmed that the Moreno Government had showered private healthcare with millions of euros, without controls, by hand, without publicity and without transparency,” according to asserted Rafael Márquez, who has also stressed that “the intervention of the Board, the internal oversight body” of the Andalusian administration, “has ruled up to 14 times on the permanent irregularities of SAS hiring during the years 2020 and 2021” .
According to the socialist representative, the Intervention reports They are also “devastating and show that we are, surely, facing the largest case of corruption in health contracting that we have known in Spain”, and allow us to reach the “conclusion” that “the entire contracting system of the Andalusian Health Service “It is flawed, contaminated, it is outside current legality and is aimed at benefiting private healthcare to the detriment of the public healthcare system.”
He added that “these reports have shown how it is common practice for the SAS to contracting splits” in “minor contracts to avoid transparent and concurrent procedures”, and that there are “458 million euros under suspicion for breaking up contracts irregularly”, just as they have warned of “abuse outside the law of emergency contracting, without that the minimum legal requirements were met to use this extraordinary figure”.
The representative of the PSOE-A has asked the counselor “How has it affected public resources?“that the SAS contracting system is “contaminated with serious irregularities”, and “what is the magnitude of the impairment of public funds” in the Andalusian public health system.
Counselor’s refusal
The counselor, for her part, has asserted that “it is flatly false that there has been legal fraud in the contracts” to which the socialists allude, and has defended that “the actions and contracts carried out by the SAS have complied with the law at all times.”
He has also defended that the SAS “has always worked with legal reports for the development of the emergency contracting modalitywhile the health alert and the need to provide assistance to citizens required it”, and “transparency” has been guaranteed by the Andalusian administration, because “both the resolutions of the contracting body and the contracts have been gradually published and addendums” on the Board’s Transparency Portal, “with public access and without any restrictions.”
Likewise, he has considered “It is flatly false that there has been legal fraud in the adjudication” of 458 million euros in minor contracts, and explained that this amount “corresponds to the sum of the minor contracts that have been made in the SAS purchasing centers of Cádiz, Córdoba, Huelva and Jaén in 2021”, where carried out “more than 295,000 contracts”, and the report of the auditors on which the PSOE-A relies to warn of a “fraud of law” in that contracting “refers only to 0.19% of the total contracts “made.
The counselor also highlighted that in 2021 “we were in the midst of a pandemic and some of these contracts “They served to expedite the purchase of vaccines” against the coronavirus, and along these lines he has highlighted the “context” in which these hirings took place, that of a pandemic in which the “priority objective” of the autonomous administration was to “save the lives of Andalusians” and “guarantee the safety of our professionals”.
“In those moments there was no time to lose and we had to give a urgent solution to this exceptional situation“, with “a new disease with an enormous contagion capacity”, and where it was necessary to continue “caring for patients” with other serious pathologies such as oncology, as he stressed to justify “the use of this emergency contracting modality” , which “was not only done in our health system, but was also done in other communities” and at the level of the Ministry of Health, as he pointed out.
However, the counselor added that “some of the administrative procedures, with more time, perhaps could have been improved”, and “being aware of this circumstance allows us to learn from experience and improve the management of the health system”, which “It now has more control, planning and publication tools that are larger and more reliable than those we had before the pandemic.“, he defended before adding that, “with this objective, the recommendations made by the different reports of the Intervention have been carried out.”