The Minister of Health and Consumer Affairs of the Government of Andalusia, Rocío Hernández, has once again denied that a “legal fraud” occurred in hiring of the Andalusian Health Service (SAS) for the emergency procedure during the pandemic Covid-19and has assured that it is “flatly false” that this circumstance occurred.
The Andalusian head of Health has reiterated this message on several occasions in the course of her response to a question raised in the Plenary Session of Parliament by the deputy of the Socialist Group Rafael Márquez, after a court in Seville has admitted the complaint filed by the PSOE-A is being processed about said contracts.
“It is flatly false that fraud has occurred in the contracts. The actions and contracts carried out by the SAS have complied with the law at all times,” the counselor responded.
He has also defended that the SAS “has always worked with legal reports for the development of the emergency contracting modality, while 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 and addendums have been gradually published” in the Board Transparency Portal“with public access and without any restrictions.”
He has stressed that it is “flatly false that there has been a fraud in the award” of 458 million euros in minor contracts, and has 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 “more than 295,000 contracts” were made, and the report of the auditors on which they rely from the PSOE-A to warn of a “fraud of law” in that contract “refers only 0.19% of the total of contracts” made.
The counselor also highlighted that in 2021 “we were in the middle of the Covid 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 they occurred, 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.
“There was no time to lose”
«In those moments there was no time to waste and An urgent solution had to be found 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 ” It was not only done in our health system, but It was also done in other communities» and at the level of the Ministry of Health, as stated.
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 learn from experience and improve the management of the health systemwhich 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 Intervention reports have been carried out»
During his speech, the socialist parliamentarian echoed the decision of the Investigative Court number 13 of Seville to admit for processing the complaint presented by the PSOE-A on June 20 against the Government of the Junta 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 Covid-19 pandemic and which, according to the socialists, the SAS continued to use until 2023, “two years after its repeal legal”.
Rafael 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 (PP-A), like the counselor herself, must give “a clear explanation” about what happened.
Likewise, he has 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, he has chosen to do. Juanma Moreno, or the one who would choose “any decent public servant, who, in the face of any known irregularity, proceeds to purge responsibilities, whoever falls.”
The PSOE insists
The representative of the PSOE-A has referred to the “destroyer” 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 in SAS hiring.” during the years 2020 and 2021.
According to the socialist representative, the Intervention reports are also “devastating” and they 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 is flawed, contaminated , is outside current legislation 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 «smaller 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 it has 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.