The ‘ministry’ points out that there is “no indication” of profit from senior officials
Recognizes that in recent years the funds for maintenance have been exhausted before the end of the financial year
The Department of the Interior maintains that there is “no hint” that senior officials of the Generalitat Bombers have benefited financially from the contracts of the body that investigates the justice system, but admits “episodes of credit insufficiency” for “dysfunctions” in the bidding processes.
Sources from the ‘ministry’ have assured that they are acting with “total transparency” before the judicial investigation to the dome of the Firefighters of the Generalitat -including the general director of Prevention Joan Delort- for alleged irregularities in inflated invoices and alleged payment of commissions in the body’s vehicle maintenance service.
According to these sources, so far there is “no indication” that Interior officials have benefited financially from the contracts under investigation. nor have they “maneuvered” to favor the winning company, the Sevillian Iturri SA.
Bidding processes
The Department of the Interior attributes the irregularities investigated to “dysfunctions” in the bidding and maintenance procedures for the vehicles, which, they say, in the last five years have produced “recurring episodes of insufficient credit”.
The same sources indicate that, since the beginning of the legislature, the current team of the Interior -headed by Minister Joan Ignasi Elena, from ERC- is working to “revert” the situation, with measures that go through an improvement in the management of the control circuits of the execution of the contracts, a bidding process that expands the competition and one sufficient budget allocation to meet the “real needs” of the service.
As detailed by the Department of the Interior, in the last 20 years the preventive and corrective maintenance service of the fleet of vehicles of the Directorate General for Fire Prevention and Extinction (DGPEIS).
This service has a high level of complexity, they add, both due to the uniqueness of the firefighters’ vehicles and the need to provide the service to the entire territory and with permanent availability.
sole bidder
Since 2002, the company Iturri S.A. has always been the winner of all tenders that have been processed by this service and, in practically all of them, it was the only bidder.
According to Interior, the procedure consisted of the fire stations making the initial requests, the DGPEIS or the emergency regions validating them and, subsequently, the company carrying out the repair, in own or concerted workshops.
This generated, adds the ‘conselleria’, a “significant delay” in the billing made it difficult to control availability of credit, which ended up causing, from a certain time of the year, the orders will generate a billing for which nor there was credit coverage available.
Credit almost exhausted in March
In fact, at the end of March 2021, the invoicing presented by Iturri SA -whose person in charge in Catalonia is also charged- had already consumed 71% of the available annual credit.
On May 3, 2021, adds the Department, the general secretary opened a reserved information, which was closed on May 21 –five days before Elena’s inauguration and barely two weeks before Delort did– and it was decided to send the file to the Public Prosecutor’s Office and the Mossos d’Esquadra.
After an “initial assessment” of the situation, the ‘conselleria’ adopted several “urgent” measures, including resolving the contract with Iturri by anticipate the “imminent exhaustion” of credit, write the service specifications for 2022, with a 46% more budget, and commission an audit of billing.
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In November, four simplified contracts were awarded, one of them to a company other than Iturri.
With these actions “it is planned to restore the normality of the maintenance service in the first quarter of 2022, with a sufficient budget allocation so as not to fall back into credit insufficiency”, guarantees the department.