Behind The Smoke Screen: Balearics health

What the hell does the Balearic Government think it's playing at? Does it seriously believe that by threatening the former health minister and current parliamentary spokesperson of PSIB (the Balearics wing of PSOE) with investigation by anti-corruption prosecutors it is going to score some brownie points with an electorate that has seen the government effect cuts to the health service?

It probably does think this, in which case it demonstrates a genuine lack of political nous as well as cynicism, which is hardly surprising for a government that was quite cynically prepared to cash in on what was limited violence by exaggerating the level of protests against President Bauzá as an attack on democracy and is now also prepared to levy fines against protesters (it is the government levying the fines, not the police).

Cynicism is just one word that PSIB has used to describe the government's calling in of the prosecutors. It is cynical, but it is also predictable; more of this below.

But first, one needs to understand the background to the involvement of the prosecutors. In 2008, the then PSOE (PSIB)-led coalition struck a deal with the main medical union whereby medical workers were to receive additional payments to their regular salaries. This was done as a way of avoiding strike action that had been threatened in 2008. The Balearics Supreme Court, two years later, said that the agreement to make these additional payments should be declared void. The then government did not stop the payments and they have indeed continued under the new government.

The prosecutors are being asked to investigate whether the former health minister Vicenç Thomàs engaged in the misappropriation of public funds and in the abuse of his public office. These are serious accusations, and for one government to level such an accusation against a member of a former government is a pretty extraordinary state of affairs.

One says extraordinary, but it is a state of affairs that comes with a sense of the predictable. President Bauzá had made it clear that if he discovered any instances of possible misuse of public funds by the previous administration, then he would go after it. There is a distinct impression being created by the call on the prosecutors to investigate Thomas of the government having gone fishing to find something with which it can seek to effect its threat. But more than this, there is a further impression that this is all something of a payback time.

The Partido Popular has been looking for revenge, caused by its feeling that corruption cases that came up for investigation during the last administration (which didn't only involve the former Unió Mallorquina of course) were politically motivated. Quite how the charge sheet against one-time president Jaume Matas could be described as politically motivated it is difficult to understand, but the PP and Bauzá have been looking for an excuse to retaliate, and now they think they have found one.

Medical workers face having to repay over 70 million euros. The union will strike if they are forced to and PSIB has said that it will respond with a criminal complaint against the government; any suggestion that the two main parties might be able to work together in taking the Balearics out of economic crisis has been shot to pieces.

Thomàs has called the government's action a "smoke screen". Of course it's a smoke screen, anyone with any sense can see that it is. It is a smoke screen with which the government is trying to tell the public that the previous administration basically ripped the public off to the tune of over 70 million euros, so this is why the health service is in such a bad way and the public has to pay ten euros for their health cards, experience delays in treatment, read about resignations of leading personnel at hospitals because of cuts and pay 4.8 cents for a litre of petrol to pay for the missing 70 million plus. It is a smoke screen that the public surely won't buy, as calling in the prosecutors smacks of the puerile, an act by a government that is fast becoming discredited and diverting itself away from its main purpose. 

The government might hope that the anti-corruption prosecutors will take some of the heat off of it, but is there not just a further touch of cynicism about all this? There are now questions regarding President Bauzá's business affairs and the fact that he did not declare them.

A smoke screen and one that gets murkier.


Any comments to andrew@thealcudiaguide.com please.