“Killing a butterfly can’t be anything important because a butterfly can’t change things.” Or if. Ray Bradbury, one of the patriarchs of science fiction, chose the famous theory of the Butterfly effect – which postulates that tiny phenomena that happen in one place can cause a catastrophe in others – to construct his story The Sound of Thunder. . It is doubtful that the president of the Junta de Andalucía, Juan Manuel Moreno Bonilla, who is not known to have express literary predilections, has read the author of the Marcian Chronicles.
It is also unlikely – his academic resume is discreet, as well as dwindling – that he has deep knowledge of chaos theory, the field of physics that studies how combinations that may seem innocuous are capable of causing systemic changes. Ignorance about both matters does not prevent him, however, from realizing that the political unrest caused by the Koldo case and the Ayuso affair present, just like the goring of a bull, two dangerous trajectories that can cloud the conservative peace in Andalusia.
The first scandal, which affects the same waterline of the PSOE, is linked to public contracts made during the pandemic. The second, apart from the alleged tax crimes of the president of Madrid’s partner, is framed in the murky management of health supply contracts. Both parallels converge in Andalusia, where during the same period of time, since March 2020, the Junta, like other autonomies, spent enormous amounts of public funds on masks and various hospital materials without these outflows of money being subject to the ordinary public controls.
Is there a replica of the Koldo affair in Andalusia? Are there relatives of the Andalusian PP in a situation as compromised as that of Ayuso? Both questions must be answered in the negative. For now. The Board has not been involved so far in any spiral of discredit related to the Covid emergency contracts. This does not mean, however, that equivalent irregularities could not have occurred. It remains to be seen.
The Board’s health supply contracts are an arcana in political terms. The opposition in Andalusia, mainly the PSOE, believes that they are a kind of Pandora’s box. Hence they have tried – so far without success – to open it. They wanted it in the last stretch of the previous legislature, when they requested an investigation into the expenses caused by Covid. The initiative was blocked by the table of the Andalusian chamber – then dominated by PP, Cs and Vox – and was left up in the air after the electoral advance.
A few weeks ago, in the heat of the Koldo case and its ramifications, the socialists raised it again. Not so much because they believe that it can really prosper – the PP has an absolute majority in the Andalusian Parliament, whose president Jesús Aguirre was Minister of Health and directly responsible for these contracts during the pandemic – but because it will demonstrate Genoa’s double discourse on corruption. What in Madrid is the subject of an investigative commission in Congress, in Andalusia is vetoed by the president of the Board.
That this issue is disturbing at the Quirinale is no secret: apart from the cleanliness of the contracts, a matter that has not yet been addressed, it is a fact that the Palace of San Telmo, in a manifest abuse of power, maintained activates two years more than established and once the special legislation on the pandemic is repealed, the exceptional situation when hiring. Because? The decree-law of March 16, 2020, which authorized the relaxation of public controls due to the emergency situation, expired in May 2021. In Andalusia, extraordinary hiring continued at least until March 2022, without the Board had legal powers to do them nor explain the reasons.
The socialists suggest that in this period of time “there may have been a loss of public funds.” They also maintain that – without competition – Moreno Bonilla took the opportunity to divert 240 million euros to private healthcare, a figure much higher than budget forecasts. This data, in itself, does not necessarily imply an irregularity: the hospital collapse caused the Board to divert sick and infected people to private clinics and hospitals, in exchange for financial compensation.
Concerts with private healthcare, at a time of scandalous waiting lists for diagnoses with specialists and surgeries, are only part of the lion. There is much more. In 2020 alone, the Board awarded 17,472 emergency contracts worth 979 million euros. The socialists also want to investigate all purchases and expenses for the two years following this one, whose contracting volume may be analogous. And even higher.
San Telmo denies the irregularities but for months it has not been able to give a convincing explanation for the extension of the extraordinary contracting system. The doubts are justified. If the PP agrees to the investigation demanded by the PSOE, which is highly unlikely, they run the risk of encountering in the South a parliamentary forum mirroring the one that will exist in Congress. If they refuse, they will incur a contradiction, by refusing in Andalusia what they demand in Congress and the Senate. Moreno Bonilla does not trust the butterfly effect.
