The Balearic PSOE has filed a complaint in court against the general director of Health of the PP Government on the islands, Javier Ureña, for prevarication, embezzlement and influence peddling in relation to the management of the mask contract awarded in 2020 - during the mandate of the current president of Congress, Francina Armengol, to the company Soluciones de Gestión, recommended by Koldo García, main advisor to the then Minister of Transportation, José Luis Ábalos. The socialist complaint is also directed against the majority partner of Management Solutions and against this same company.
During the first months of the pandemic, the Balearic Government awarded a contract to Management Solutions for the purchase of 1.4 million masks for 3.7 million euros. The leaders of the Ministry of Health sent several samples of these masks to the laboratory of the Ministry of Labor in Seville for analysis and discovered that they were of lower quality than the contracted one, so they withdrew them from distribution and stored them for the following years.
Three years after knowing that the masks were of inferior quality to those contracted, the Balearic Government initiated a claim file for 2.6 million euros from the company Soluciones de Gestión for the insufficient quality of the contracted masks. The delay in claiming and the hand-picked awarding of a contract to the corrupt plot recommended by Koldo García caused the PP to launch itself against Armengol and ask for her resignation as president of the Congress of Deputies.
Meanwhile, the new Balearic Executive of the PP, chaired by Marga Prohens, continued with the file for the damage claim, but let it expire in January 2024 without resolving it. The general director of Health then initiated a procedure to annul the contract upon understanding that it was awarded without meeting the solvency and experience standards of the contracting company, something that was not mandatory and that had been expressly annulled due to the emergency situation that everyone was experiencing. the country.
The judicial investigation of the so-called
Koldo case
cast doubt on an alleged favorable treatment by the new Balearic Executive of the PP to the corrupt plot in order not to claim the return of the 2.6 million. The socialist complaint incorporates some documentary evidence from the investigation opened in the National Court for the alleged payment of illegal commissions to the advisor of Minister Ábalos, who facilitated the business of selling masks to various public administrations for the company Soluciones de Gestión. Among this evidence, the transcription of the telephone conversations stands out in which the managers of the company Soluciones de Gestión intervened to say, in December 2023, that “Baleares”, in relation to the PP Government, “was not going to continue with the claim for the masks". A few days after that conversation, on January 12, 2024, the file for claiming the money expired without the Balearic administration doing anything to prevent it. The PSOE denounces the “deliberate negligence” of the person responsible for Health in the Balearic Islands, Javier Ureña, for not resolving the file in time to claim from Management Solutions the return of part of the amount charged for inferior quality masks.
The Balearic Government, through a resolution signed on March 21, withdrew from the procedure for partial resolution of the contract with the Koldo plot company. At the same time, the Director General of Health initiated a procedure by which he intended to review ex officio the contract awarded in 2020 to declare its nullity. The reasons that the Balearic Government offers for canceling the contract is that the winning company lacked the economic and technical solvency to carry out the service. However, the hiring regulations of those months, the worst stage of the pandemic due to the number of deaths registered each day, allowed hiring by hand, without checking whether the companies had financial solvency or experience in the sector. And this is what the majority of public administrations did.
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The socialist complaint recalls that the Balearic Government of the PP did not make any mention of this lack of requirements to contract during the months of processing the contract resolution file and highlights that, in addition, on those dates "it was not mandatory to verify the capacity to act and the solvency of the winning company”, as indicated by numerous reports from the Court of Auditors that audited public spending on health supplies by different administrations.
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