The Councilor for the Presidency, Laura Vilagrà , has appeared in the Parliament of Catalonia to explain the chaos that occurred in the holding of the oppositions last week, an organizational disaster that the leader awarded to the contracted company (Cegos) for ” logistical or mechanical tasks”, he limited, whose “flagrant breach of contract” justifies that the Government has decided to claim compensation of at least one million euros and initiate a patrimonial liability file to try to compensate the damages suffered by the applicants.
Vilagrà ‘s appearance in the Institutional Affairs committee of the Catalan Chamber comes one day after the minister appeared to announce that the Government had decided to repeat the exams next July in view of the large number and seriousness of the incidents noted on the day of the tests. This fact has provoked the protest of some parliamentary groups, such as PSC and Junts, who have accused him of “contempt for deputies”.
The minister showed her displeasure with the incidents and repeated in her speech up to three times how bad she knew what had happened, but she defended that from the first day “decisions were made”, such as the collection of testimonies of the incidents that have finally led the Government to conclude that “confidence in the entire process” was considered broken and that “what happened is unjustifiable and completely breaks the contractual conditions” with the company.
Now, the Government will open a patrimonial responsibility file for Cegos to “try to compensate the damages” generated to the applicants. “We will compensate the opposition people. Although this does not compensate for all the suffering, it seems relevant to us to make the decision” because “we know that they have suffered considerable harm,” Vilagrà said.
However, the minister insisted that “we have taken measures” and promised to complete the process of stabilization of officials. In this way, the development of the tests in July will be held with its own resources -on July 1 will be the exams for rural, penitentiary and transversal labor agents and on July 8 for civil servants-.
Along these lines, Vilagrà also justified the dismissal of the director of the Public Service, Marta Martorell. He positioned the situation as a way of not avoiding responsibility: “That’s why we fired the CEO, because it’s clear that we could have done better but the company has breached the contract,” she insisted. However, some parties have reminded him that Martorell was appointed in January of this year while the decision to outsource the organization of the oppositions occurred in the summer, almost seven months earlier.
Vilagrà also defended the decision that was made in his day to hire the Cegos company because “it has proven more than 5 years of experience in this type of task”, he detailed in his day the methodology that they use and has worked for some public entities, such as the Barcelona City Hall, the Valencia metro and several Madrid hospitals, as he explained. “It was a company that had worked a lot for the administrations and also for Catalan ones,” concluded the minister, and even the day before the tests were carried out the process “was validated by the company saying that everything was ready.”
But the parliamentary groups have not been satisfied with Vilagrà ‘s explanations. Although no one asked for the minister’s resignation – only Vox and the CUP if they did not rectify the way they act with the unions – PSC and Junts were very harsh with the situation. Both warned that everything will end up in court because the company intends to defend itself, as evidenced this Thursday with a statement in which it blames the Government for the mess. Given this scenario, the opposition has warned the minister that she will have to explain very well that the fault lies solely with Cegos.
In fact, the socialist deputy Marta Moreta recalled that the incidents related to 99.7% of the affected squares give an image of the magnitude of the disaster in some tests that “not only Cegos has managed, but also you”, has remarked. In any case, for the majority of parties the origin of this event begins with a “bad decision” to privatize tasks that “are not only mechanical tasks but also to guarantee the legal security” of the process.
