The Parliament of Galicia is preparing to host a high-voltage commission that aims to shake the walls of the main office on Génova Street in Madrid. During the pandemic, companies owned by relatives of Alberto Núñez Feijóo have moved forward despite the resistance of Alfonso Rueda’s PP, which, however, has managed to curtail its content. To begin with, Feijóo’s management will be investigated without Feijóo’s explanations. The popular Galicians have imposed their absolute majority this Friday to approve a work plan that vetoes the appearance of the person who was president of the Xunta for 13 years. The BNG considers that the Rueda blockade “is a confession of guilt and fear.”
That of his party leader is not the only statement that Rueda’s deputies have prevented. The work plan of the commission that has moved forward only with the votes in favor of the PP also does not accept that Feijóo’s relatives who are directors in the benefited companies give explanations. This is Micaela Núñez Feijóo, sister of the former Galician president and delegate in Galicia of the Eulen Group, to which the Galician Government placed orders for 55 million euros between 2018 and 2023 according to calculations by the Block; and Ignacio Cárdenas Botas, brother of his partner and commercial director of Universal Support, a firm that obtained almost 20 million euros in contract contracts between May 2020 and October 2021.
While Isabel Díaz Ayuso has called Begoña Gómez, the popular Galicians have saved Alberto González Amador, boyfriend of the Madrid president, from drinking. González Amador did business during the pandemic with the Pontevedra company Mape Asesores, to which the Xunta awarded 12 contracts for more than 10.4 million between April and July 2020 in addition to paying surcharges. The BNG and the PSdeG wanted to interrogate Ayuso’s partner as the owner of Maxwel Cremona, SL, a company “intermediary of the contracting between Mape Asesores and the Xunta” according to the socialists. The PSOE also intended for him to appear in the Galician Parliament, due to his relationship with one of the businessmen who benefited from Xunta contracts during the pandemic, but he has collided with the PP’s veto. The political investigation will also focus on the awards to Sibucu 360, a firm unrelated to the health sector and, according to the Block, linked to a businessman convicted of fraud and falsehood: José Ramón García, former CEO of Blusens. In 2019, the Xunta commissioned him for 765,000 euros; in 2020, for 31 million. Those from Rueda have also prevented García from appearing.
Due to the contracts made by the Xunta during the pandemic, the popular people do not see it necessary for Feijóo to testify but they will call the former Minister of Health and current president of the Generalitat of Catalonia, Salvador Illa. Rueda and various officials from the left-wing bipartite Xunta (PSOE-BNG) that governed Galicia between 2005 and 2009 will also participate. The latter will do so because another of the commission’s objects of investigation is the public-private collaboration contract that Feijóo signed. to build the Álvaro Cunqueiro hospital in Vigo and which was 470 million euros more expensive and with 700 fewer beds than with the purely public formula. The possibility of using this mixed model to finance the health complex was studied by the Government of socialist Emilio Pérez Touriño but it was ruled out, which is why its former officials are going to participate in the commission.
The PP created this investigation commission, but the BNG has carried it out by making use of the only opportunity that the parliamentary regulations give it in the entire legislature to take this step unilaterally and thanks to the fact that it has a third of the Chamber deputies (25 of the 75 seats). The work plan, which includes the documentation that will be analyzed and the people who will appear, has however remained in the hands of the popular ones because their absolute majority prevails there. Pontón’s nationalists asked Rueda’s group to allow the program to be approved with a qualified two-thirds majority, but their proposal was not accepted.
Hours before the vote, Rueda expressed in statements to the media his fear that the political investigation of the pandemic contracts would lead to “a defamation commission” and his parliamentary spokesperson, Alberto Pazos, defended the veto of Feijóo’s statement. so as not to turn it into a “circus”. The PP argues that the former president of the Xunta already appeared “many times” in the Chamber about these contracts when he was in office. “The same Feijóo who in Madrid asks for transparency and appearances refuses to testify in the Parliament of the country that he presided over for 13 years,” criticizes the nationalist Ana Pontón. “But not even all the authoritarianism, all the vetoes and all the manipulation are going to prevent the light from being shed on their 15 years of shenanigans.”
“Neither vetoes nor compromises,” the leader of the PSdeG, José Ramón Gómez Besteiro, claimed unsuccessfully before the afternoon meeting in which the work plan was approved. After the vote, the socialist called the result a “mockery of transparency and citizenship.” In his opinion, preventing appearances is only explained if “you have something to hide.”
