After the scandal unleashed by the recent hiring of his son as usher of the Chamber without having informed the Table of this relationship, his situation had become unsustainable and finally the secretary general of the Parlament, Esther Andreu, has been forced to resign.
Parliamentary sources have assured that the Board has decided to commission a report from the Anti-Frau Office on Andreu's management in the procedure that led his son to get a place as an usher in an interim call. Faced with this new turn of events, Andreu has been forced to present her resignation to the president.
Last week, Borràs tried to veto the commission of the external legal report on the interim position of usher that the son of the general secretary won, which is what the representatives of the PSC, ERC and CUP Board insistently demanded of him, that is to say , all except Junts, which sits Aurora Madaula on the governing body in addition to the president.
From the beginning of the controversy, the general secretary has defended that she did not participate in the selection process of the job market and that she was "verbally" inhibited after the publication of the call to avoid conflict of interest. But these explanations did not convince all the members of the Table. First the Socialists and later the CUP and ERC raised Borràs' disagreement with him. The relationship of forces (5 to 2 in favor of an external audit) has finally tipped the balance.
These five members of the Board insisted that the best way to remove any shadow of doubt about the neatness of the process carried out was to request an external audit. For this reason, before today's Board meeting, all the members, all seven, met without the presence of the general secretary and the lawyers to urge the president to request the external report, which has finally been decided apply to the Antifrau Office of Catalonia.
It has been of no use, therefore, that last week the general secretary delivered a report, commissioned by herself from one of the Parliament's lawyers, which concluded that the selection process has been carried out "without invalidating vices or defects", despite to that "procedural acts have been dictated, not foreseen in the bases, but justified and reasonable".
Then, the fourth secretary of the Table, the Republican Rubén Wagensberg, already questioned the suitability of a subordinate auditing the actions of his superior at his express request, an opinion that was seconded by the two socialist members and the only representative of the CUP in the Table, which presented a document to completely disassociate itself from this procedure, something that the PSC, represented by the second vice president, Assumpta Escarp, and the first secretary, Ferran Pedret, had already done the previous week. "It is a shameful situation," parliamentary sources pointed out.
The president maintained at all times that the request for an external legal report would imply a disavowal of the Parliament's lawyers, but, after reading the internal text prepared by the Chamber's lawyers and presented last Tuesday, this week the Board has decided take a step further and Borràs has been forced to give in and ask Antifrau for an opinion, which has left Andreu in an untenable situation.
The conflict of interest is described, as pointed out in an intervention at the Table last week by the senior lawyer of the Parliament, in the Law of the Legal Regime of the Public Sector, in its article 23, which establishes that they must refrain from any administrative act those persons who have a "service relationship with a natural or legal person directly interested in the matter".
