La Rioja 360, a public company that is responsible for managing the tourism promotion of the autonomous community, still does not have a peaceful life. The PSOE has denounced in parliamentary headquarters the hiring in the organization, as a self-employed worker, of a former collaborator of the director … General of Tourism, Virgina Borges, in the private company that he previously managed.
In a question raised this morning, deputy Miguel González de Legarra expressed his conviction that we are facing an irregular contract, closed with a “false self-employed person” who also has a close friendship with the general director. «Since August, this person – says Legarra – has presented five invoices to La Rioja 360 in four months, which have a consecutive numbering, which tells us that this self-employed person does not have more clients than her former boss. Every month he presented one for 2,525 euros plus VAT and a fifth, in December, which he issued for the same amount, as if it were Christmas pay. And all for the same concept.
Legarra blamed the current Executive for allowing a case of nepotism and violating the regulations: “Everything indicates that we are facing a splitting of the contract, to which we must also add a clear case of false self-employment. The accumulated total far exceeds 15,000 euros, which is what the law authorizes for minor contracts that can be awarded directly; and all to financially benefit a former employee. The socialist deputy, who was strangely called out by the president for “not sticking to the matter,” linked this situation to the wave of mental illnesses that several public company workers have had.
The Minister of Culture, José Luis Pérez Pastor, denied any hint of malpractice: “You don’t know how many ways and means you have screwed up, from a technical, political and personal point of view,” he reproached her. Pérez Pastor has referred to the poor tourism figures during the previous government to justify the decision of the general director: “According to Exceltur, La Rioja is in 15th place out of 17 after four years of socialist government. And they get the worst score in strategic vision: the one that depends directly on the government. How can we not act if we find ourselves in a real disaster! You can’t change things by doing exactly the same thing. Many things in La Rioja 365 depended on a single person; we had to work in a more dynamic way, in several departments.”
Pérez Pastor has indicated that continuity was offered to all workers, but that it was deemed necessary to establish “a new system, a new methodology and new software tools.” «There has been no division. What there has been is a need for technical assistance in an urgent task to remedy the state in which the previous Government left tourism,” he concluded. Regarding the correlative numbering of invoices sent to the Government, Pérez Pastor assured that a worker can use different numbering to deal with the administration or with other clients. He has also asked not to speculate on the reasons for staff dismissals: “That belongs to the worker’s intimate sphere,” he concluded.
Legarra, however, was not convinced by the counselor’s explanations and suspected that we were faced with a possible act of “gamguism and prevarication”: “There is even an explicit recognition from the general director when she says that it was necessary to speed up the work. You could not wait four weeks to correctly carry out a tender as established by law. But, on the other hand, there was time to put out a tender to buy pages worth a thousand euros. That’s what we’re discussing. “We are facing a case of political corruption for not respecting the legal selection processes to favor a friend of the general director.”
For the Minister of Culture, this question was only a “desire to confuse”: “How can you talk about covert privatisation for a contract of 15,000 euros in a structure of ten million? Very soon, these results will begin to be seen, but I will not allow the good name of a person to be called into question.” Pérez Pastor ended by referring to the two direct contracts that, in the same organisation, had been made by the Government of the now absent Concha Andreu. Legarra had warned him minutes before not to counterattack with this argument: “We already paid for that and now we find ourselves in the opposition. Now it is you who must give explanations.”
#Argentina
