The outbreak of the pandemic covid-19 forced public administrations around the world, at the same time and against the clock, to undertake emergency measures to deal with the health emergency. In particular, it was pressing, in the first months, the wild competition for procuring in international media markets such as respirators, gloves and masks. And immediately, that of activating and providing health and care resources in a dimension and with a degree of urgency that no one had foreseen. One of the decisions that was necessary was to apply, during the state of alarm, the expeditious procedures provided for by the legislation that regulates the public contracts in a situation of extreme urgency.
Health emergency, increased spending and lifting of controls on the transparency of the procedures to execute it created an environment in which, as already warned in April 2020 by the Anti-Frau Office Catalan, “the risk of fraud, corruption and waste of public resources it does not disappear but increases” and can allow “powerful actors to take advantage of the crisis for their own benefit”. The following year, the Agència Valenciana Antifrau, for example, regretted that emergency hiring had been “normalized”, often paying prices “well above market prices”, far beyond what was necessary.
The bodies responsible for regulating public procurement and overseeing public spending and the judges have barely begun to scratch the surface of how the spending billions of euros under conditions of lax control. In a small sample of 134 contracts, for example, the Court of Auditors It has already warned that “in a significant number of cases” the suitability of the successful bidders was not verified and “in most of the audited contracts there is no record of the request for offers from more than one company.”
In this context, various episodes have transpired in which the use of public resources has been questioned. From the collection of commissions by characters with family connections in the Madrid public administrations, in the case of Alberto Luceño and Luis Medina, scandalous in their volume and with signs of fraud in the quality of the material supplied, to the millionaire purchase of masks by part of the ICS investigated by Antifrau or the spending in Catalonia of millions of euros on positive nursing home places that were paid for but never used, not even in the crudest of the first waves.
The questionable actions that have been known until now, such as these, may have hidden practices of influence peddling and fraud in which the description of “rogues” that Alberto Nunez Feijoo he applied to Medina and Luceño falls short; actions even more indecent as they profited from a situation in which the death toll was climbing and the country’s economy was sinking. Or also cases in which the Administration was swindled in its peremptory search for medical supplies in international markets that had become a veritable jungle of profiteers. Or decisions that ended up being unwise at a time when it was difficult to modulate the volume of resources that would be necessary in an unpredictable situation.
Whatever the circumstance, be it corruption, incompetence or an inability to react appropriately to an overwhelming crisis, a accountability exhaustive and systematic on the entire volume of public spending managed under these conditions. And not only reactively in the face of specific complaints.