Matas And The Scandals That Won't Go Away

So, Jaume Matas may escape a further term in prison if he spills the beans. He would know that he potentially faces a far longer stretch than the nine months he spent in Segovia prison for peddling influence in arranging illegal payments to a journalistic cheerleader. The Son Espases Hospital affair eclipses even the Palma Arena case in terms of the money that was involved in the project. The cost of the contract is almost incidental, however. The links to alleged illegal funding of the Partido Popular are most certainly not.

Reaction from politicians with parties other than the PP (from which little or nothing is being heard) ranges from the phlegmatic to the apoplectic. While all this reaction suggests that Matas shouldn't avoid doing time, there is an acceptance that Matas holds a key - possibly the key - to revealing the secrets of this funding. These politicians won't know exactly what Matas knows. They will be capable of hazarding shrewd guesses, but the knowledge resides with the justice system and the anti-corruption prosecution service in particular.

While Matas was in prison, he appeared by videoconference link at a hearing into Son Espases. This was the bizarre occasion when his head was bandaged. He apparently had an ear infirmity and was therefore unable to hear the questions being put to him. Before he left prison, he was visited by the chief anti-corruption prosecutor, Pedro Horrach. It was said at the time that he exercised his right not to say anything. It now appears that things were rather different and that Matas was all ears. The origin of a deal to spill the beans was during that meeting with Horrach.

Why is Son Espases so important, and important enough for the national anti-corruption prosecution service to back the regional service and so Horrach's deal? It has everything to do with funding of the PP and with work on a remodelling of its headquarters building in the calle Génova in Madrid. The allegation is that the award of the contract for the construction of Son Espases was rigged in favour of the company OHL, the president of which is Juan Miguel Villar Mir, a long-ago minister of finance (in the period immediately after Franco's death) and the recipient of a marquis title from the former king in 2011.

The charge is that it was Matas who rigged the award. In the end, OHL didn't get the contract. This was after suspicions about the contract appeared in the press. Matas intervened and the award ultimately went to the rival consortium. But Matas, it is said, didn't act independently. He was under instruction from the PP nationally.

A famous envelope containing instructions that the tender board was to follow has been referred to often during investigations. The then health minister, Aina Castillo, has testified that she was given this envelope - without knowing its contents - to be passed on. Matas was the one who gave her the envelope, but he - the allegation is - was given it by the formal national treasurer of the PP, Alvaro Lapuerta. Matas, it is understood, is prepared to state this in court.

OHL and Villar Mir come into the story because Luis Barcenas, another former treasurer, has testified that Villar Mir was a major funder of the PP. He gave the party a significant sum - 300,000 euros - for its 2011 election campaign, but he has also come under investigation for payments in cash amounting to two million euros. An implication is that he paid for work at the headquarters.

Barcenas is also crucial to this whole affair. The infamous "B" accounts which he supposedly operated - undeclared income and payments - have been the subject of investigation by the national high court. A judge, Pablo Ruz, concluded eighteen months ago that the PP had used this "B" system between 1990 and 2008. Both Barcenas and Lapuerta were cited by the judge. Moreover, the judge said that according to Barcenas's accounts, Villar Mir had delivered over half a million euros between 2004 and 2008.

Whatever the rights or wrongs of Matas avoiding prison, the revelation that he might do comes at a bad time for the PP. While Matas was involved in corruption from several years go - it is now nine years since his second and final period as Balearic president ended - there are more up-to-date scandals surrounding the party, not least in Valencia, where Rita Barberá, the former mayor of Valencia, is facing allegations of money laundering that relate to the time just before the elections in spring 2015.

The additional backdrop of course is the ongoing uncertainty with the national government. A reason for this uncertainty has been the rise of Podemos and Ciudadanos, both of them taking firm aim against corruption. The PP's moral authority for government takes a constant battering. Matas, and what he might have to say, diminishes that authority ever more.

Flu Collapses The Health Service

In the middle of January, the nursing union in the Balearics was complaining about the saturation of the emergencies unit at Son Espases hospital. Thirty patients were said to be waiting to be admitted to the hospital at a time when cold weather led to increased pressures being placed on the health service. The minister for health, Martí Sansaloni, insisted that all beds in all hospitals were open and that fifty additional medical staff had been drafted in to help tackle what was described as a temporary peak in demand.

There is now, three weeks later, another peak. It is one caused by flu. At the time when the nursing union was complaining about the overload in emergencies, flu entered the Balearics, specifically during the week from 15 January to 22 January. It was later than usual, but now it is here, the peak in flu cases in Mallorca will be from now until 12 February. And this peak is much greater than is normal. Between 22 and 29 January, it was already three times more. There is something of a flu epidemic, though it will be a few days before the number of cases is being revealed, and with the cold weather for this week an additional factor, hospital emergency services will be even more hard stretched.

According to records, the year 2001-2002 was when the Balearics registered the greatest incidence of flu - 322 cases per 100,000 people: approximately 3,500 in all. By no means all flu sufferers need emergency treatment and there are doubtless some who clog up the emergencies unnecessarily; it is predominantly the elderly who do require this treatment and with the flu peak only just starting, emergencies already can't cope.

The incidence of flu in Mallorca is typically lower than elsewhere in Spain. This, so it is argued, should mean that demand can be adequately met, but, and despite Son Espases being one of Spain's most modern hospitals, the health service seems to be caught out every year by the peaks. Of the public hospitals on the island, they are all struggling, with the exception of Manacor. Regardless of the comparative number of cases across different regions of Spain, the Balearics is a region identified in a report by local ombudsmen which points to an impairment of patients' dignity because of the "repeated examples of saturation" and so to the unacceptable situation whereby patients are kept in corridors on stretchers and are also subject to potential violations of rights to privacy and to health information confidentiality.

Of solutions to this regular crisis, one that is being considered is to transfer patients to private hospitals and to convert the old hospital of Son Dureta into some form of residence for elderly patients. The problem with both of these is finance, and as was seen towards the end of 2014, it was a lack of finance which caused local health centres to suspend appointments. The health ministry blamed a computing failure, but very few people bought that argument, including many health professionals who were not brought in to cover for sick leave or holidays, which was the real cause of the appointments suspension.

Using Son Dureta would clearly be advantageous, but getting any agreement on what to do with the former hospital is proving to be stubbornly difficult. Sansaloni raised the idea of a commission to look into its future last November, which was strange as you might have thought that there already was a commission and some idea as to what function Son Dureta would have, if any. Sadly, when Son Dureta was closed there was no plan in place. It has pretty much just been abandoned.

With the new Son Espases and the other public hospitals, it was felt that there would be adequate supply and generally speaking there is. There have been rumblings about lengthening waiting times for operations and other treatments, but by and large the health service does cope, except when there are the peaks as at present. A further solution to the current situation is that operations should be postponed, so freeing up beds, but the unions maintain that this will not happen because of the imminence of the elections. Yes, but then saturation in emergencies doesn't do much electoral good for the government either.

If it all boils down to financing, then the regional government can argue, with some justification, that its overall funding from Madrid is inadequate. It is inadequate, but  the specific budget for health in the Balearics is the biggest of the lot (1,181 million euros in 2015, a 10% increase) and, surprisingly enough, it is bigger than regions with higher populations - Andalusia, Catalonia, Valencia, Galicia, Madrid all have lower health budgets. So, maybe financing isn't the issue. Instead, perhaps it is just one of better management. In Manacor, they cope by working longer hours and also by adopting rigorous procedures for admission and discharging.

When Canaries Sing Of Corruption

Just when you thought that everyone had gone away on their jollies and that the rest of August would lie quietly in the deep heat-induced somnolence of late summer and maintain the enervated silence induced by thirty degrees, a good lunch and a bucket of sangria, something stirs deep in the cesspit of the past and explodes with the force of a sewage pipe ripped apart by the pressure of accumulated and stinking waste. It is an eruption of the most unhealthy variety, spewing out over the monument of Mallorca's health service. The deep-cleaned, bacteria-free white walls of Son Espases were showered with muck of the brownest type.

Aina Castillo was Jaume Matas's most loyal acolyte. Not is. Was. While others had long waved their hankies at the shoreline and watched as their former master was sunk by their confessions, Aina, the one-time subservient servant at the ministry of sanitation, had continued to calm the drowning former president with her enduring loyalty. Until, that is. As any good canary can tell you, when there is a whiff of gas, there is danger ahead. It is time to get out quick. Or it is time to activate the explosion before the explosion launches you over the battlements of Palma's jail and deposits you on top of Maria Munar. It is time for all good canaries to sing. Aina sang. This was not a love song. "I have a new goal, I'm changing my ways. Where money applies, this is not a love song." The Johnny Rottenness of public image was fully exposed. Money had applied all along. Aina had changed her ways. The anti-corruption prosecutors were taking aim at the goal, one already inside a gaol. Aina blew the lid on the sewage pipe. Matas had rigged the tender to construct Son Espases. The biggest corruption scandal of the lot had shattered the sleep and dreamtime of late August.

Of course, everyone had long suspected that Son Espases was iffy. It was just that the nature of the iffiness was not known. It is now. Jaume gave instructions that one of the bidders should gain higher marks. The winner was Dragados. Technical reports had given a rival, OHL, better marks. But it still lost.

Prosecutors will be having a word with Jaume, currently on leave in Segovia's prison. The "caso Son Espases" threatens to eclipse even the Palma Arena affair. And for the present incumbent in the presidential palace, José Ramón Bauzá, it is a horrible reminder of the not-so-long-ago past. The bad debts that Matas had left had been written off, so Joserra has said. The biggest debt of all now brings renewed harmfulness. And what does the president do about Aina? She's still knocking around. His presidency was to have been a clean one. Unfortunately, it can't be because it can't escape the recent past. Not when the walls of Son Espases are dripping with the filth of corruption.