The Casa del Rey reported this Wednesday at six in the afternoon that it had published on its website the new hiring instructions and of budget procedure that will mark from now on the operation of the Head of State. In general, Zarzuela assumes the public sector contract law and the general budget law, except for what affects the private sphere of the royal family.
In the penultimate sheet of the document on contracts, there is a section that lists those who will be “excluded” from that process of that transparency process, which comes almost nine years after Felipe VI came to the throne: contracts for purchases, services or workers for tasks will not be known “of the internal regime of their residences” or protocol that “members of the royal family” need. The instructions state that “purchase, donation, exchange, lease and other similar legal transactions on real estate, marketable securities and intangible property will not be advertised either, except those that fall on computer programs and must be classified as supply contracts or services”, nor “contracts relating to financial services” or “contracts subject to labor law”.
Despite these exceptions, the Head of State stresses that these instructions, released this Wednesday, are part of the “modernization process” initiated by the Monarch in his proclamation, in 2014, and seeks to reinforce “the principles of transparency, accountability and publicity, in line with the Crown’s commitment to society to observe a upright, honest and transparent conduct”. As in the public sector contracts law, people convicted with a final sentence for, among other crimes, terrorism, illegal financing of political parties, corruption in businesscrimes against the Public Treasury and money laundering.
Contracts of more than 15,000 euros
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The Casa del Rey will publish on its website the contracts it signs for an amount greater than 15,000 euros and information on the entire process: the announcement of the tender, the specifications, the award and the final document signed with the Head of State . Regarding minor contracts, each quarter will say the object, duration, amount and who has been awarded. Those that do not reach 3,500 euros will not be published.
Given the budgetary and accounting procedure, the Zarzuela adjusts its operation to that which already operates in the public sector, although it recalls that the Constitution recognizes, in its article 65, that the Monarch can “freely” distribute the items assigned to him by the State. This year, that game rises to 8.43 million euros. It is frozen in the General Budgets for the third consecutive year.