The Court of Auditors is in full control of the covid contracts of the pandemic and analyzes, among other aspects, the management of more than 2,000 million euros spent by the different administrations on medical supplies between March and May 2020. The autonomous communities managed more than half of that expense.
In one of them, from the Community of Madrid, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office and the European Prosecutor's Office dispute the investigation of a contract for KN-95 masks for 1.5 million euros awarded to a company owned by a friend of the regional president, Isabel Diaz Ayuso.
That company paid the brother of the regional leader at least 55,000 euros for his efforts to obtain the material in China and transfer it to Madrid.
The Court of Auditors has powers over five autonomous communities that lack a control body (Castilla-La Mancha, Cantabria, La Rioja, Murcia and Extremadura, in addition to Ceuta and Melilla), but will incorporate the data provided by the rest of the communities into its analysis .
The health expenditure of the central administration was carried out mainly through the Institute of Health Management (Ingesa), although all the expenditure of the administration will be audited, ministry by ministry.
The shortage of masks, gloves or self-diagnostic tests made the Government allow all administrations to buy without rules, without competition and without controls "to meet the needs arising from the protection of people to deal with Covid-19".
The alarm decree approved by the Government on March 14, 2020 established that the contracts for the material necessary to combat the pandemic were not subject to “the obligation to process the file or be subject to the formal requirements established in the Law.”
This exceptional situation that allowed emergency hiring was maintained for 422 days —between March 14, 2020 and May 9, 2021—, through the different alarm decrees that the Government was approving.
Public administrations resorted to this contracting system in the majority.
The lack of controls and competition triggered endless problems due to the prices paid with public funds or the quality of the products from China.
Along with this, certain businessmen,
Now it is the third important audit of the Court of Auditors to detect problems in the hiring of administrations during the pandemic.
After analyzing the management of the 12 cities in Spain with a population of more than 300,000 inhabitants —it audited 400 contracts for more than 100 million euros—, and that of a dozen organizations —independent administrative authorities and other public entities and state foundations—, the auditor faces the study of the largest health expenditure in less time in the history of Spain: 2,000 million euros in just three months.
Public auditors have already detected the price chaos unleashed during the worst months of the pandemic.
The Bank of Spain came to acquire FFP2 masks for 9.44 euros at the same time that the Tax Agency in Catalonia bought the same material at 4.87, and RTVE acquired it for between 2.08 and 3.03.
The central administration, whose management of pandemic purchases is under suspicion after the complaint filed by the PP group in the Madrid Assembly, came to buy five million FFP2 masks at 2.5 euros per month through the Ministry of Urban Mobility. Unit.
The Court of Auditors did not dare in its first two reports to draw conclusions about this mess “because there were multiple variables at play that conditioned each of the contracts”.
In the case of the audit of the 12 most populous cities in Spain, he pointed out the anomaly of contracting emergency material that did not arrive until many months after contracting;
or not calling contests in the face of anticipated needs well in advance when the severity of the pandemic had already subsided.
