He mayor from Córdoba, José María Bellido, considered this Thursday “normal” that the Provincial Prosecutor’s Office of Córdoba has opened proceedings following the complaint filed by the PSOE for the purchase of 8,000 rapid Covid-19 detection tests by Sadeco. The public company spent 340,000 euros plus VAT on this acquisition. Bellido has argued that, after filing a complaint, “the normal thing” is for the Public Ministry to investigate it and has said that the City Council will collaborate with the Public Ministry to deliver all the reports required.
The first mayor has also highlighted that at the time of acquiring the tests, at the peak of the pandemic and despite the fact that the regulations were lowered to give more flexibility to the administrations, the City Council maintained “demands above the law”and the legal reports account for all of this.
“The PSOE must be made to look at it”, has criticized Bellido, who has cited that the President of the Government, Pedro Sánchez, has several relatives under investigation, to which is added the so-called Koldo case. “They should look less at the speck in another’s eye and more at the beams in their own,” he said.
The Public Ministry, specifically, has asked the City Council of the capital of Córdoba to forward all contracts signed with the Beiman clinic. In addition, the prosecutor requests that “the City Council of Córdoba be informed so that the body in charge of the Supervision and Intervention of public procurement issues a report on the legality of the contracting carried out in file C20/50, called contract for carrying out 8,000 rapid tests to detect Covid among Sadeco workers”.
This is not the only request that the Prosecutor’s Office makes, since it also demands to know “if an economic study was carried out about the market price of the service that is the subject of the contract, if said file includes the report mentioned in the legal report of August 31, 2020, issued to validate the use of the emergency contract, which refers to said report.” , as stated in the writing.
Lastly, the Public Ministry asks the City Council of Córdoba that “if there was a possible connection of the winning company with the SMD company – sports medical services – in said contract there was concurrence of companies or, on the contrary, it would have prevented said contracting. requirement”.
The secretary’s report
After the first request by the PSOE, and before taking the case to court, the mayor asked the general secretary of the Plenary, Valeriano Lavela, to issue a legal report “on the adaptation to current regulations of the contracting file processed, in its day, by this City Council regarding the acquisition of medical supplies and analytical tests for Sadeco staff as a result of the pandemic caused by Covid-19”.
Lavela’s report concluded that “no irregularity has been appreciated or detected and/or regulatory in the administrative processing, nor the commission of a possible criminal offense either by authorities or municipal public employees, belonging to both the parent entity of the Córdoba City Council and the municipal company Sadeco, in the processing and execution of file C20/40 referring to the emergency contracting provided for in article 120 of the Public Sector Contracts Law for the provision of the service of carrying out eight thousand (8,000) rapid detection tests for Covid-19 for the employees of said municipal company”.
