The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has entered the scene in the case of the former Direcció General d’Atenció a la Infància i l’Adolescència (known as Dgaia, now renamed Dgppia). According to La Vanguardia, this specialized body of the Public Prosecutor’s Office will be the one to determine, in the first instance, whether there was any breach in the payment of aid to young people formerly under guardianship by the Generalitat.
Read more The political odyssey
Following several complaints sent to the Anti-Fraud Office of Catalonia (OAC), all confined to the Girona area, this body was carrying out two parallel investigations. On one hand, it sought to clarify whether there had been any deficiencies in payments to young people formerly under guardianship by the Generalitat. On the other, it was investigating whether so-called phantom places actually existed, that is, young people formerly under guardianship who no longer lived in the flats managed by Dgaia, but were still registered, without the situation being regularized and with the managing entity – the UTE Mercè Fontanilles-Fundació Resilis – receiving subsidies for housing them.
Well, according to sources familiar with the case, the first of the two investigations has already been completed and its conclusions were sent – specifically last week – to the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, which in March showed interest in the case by contacting the OAC. The second, regarding possible phantom places, is still open and it could still be a few months before it concludes.
Thus, it will now be up to the Prosecutor’s Office to determine whether the possible deficiencies found by Anti-Fraud in the first of the two investigations could result in breaches of contractual obligations.
If the Prosecutor’s Office had not intervened, the OAC, upon completing the first investigation, would have referred it to the Department of Social Rights to determine whether there were contractual breaches or not.
Read more Misinformation and passivity, equal to crisis
This intervention of the Prosecutor’s Office in the Dgaia case comes a week after the parliamentary committee that analyzed the controversies in which Dgaia has been (and is) involved published its conclusions, which limited themselves to pointing out, among other things, that the child protection system is “overwhelmed” because it has had to operate “from an emergency logic” or that the “sustained pressure” on the system has become “structural”.
Not a word regarding the alleged fraud of the UTE Mercè Fontanilles-Fundació Resilis, a private entity responsible for the monitoring and assessment service of the economic benefit for young people formerly under guardianship, which was reported by one of its workers, who is still a protected witness of the OAC today.
Regarding payments to formerly under guardianship, the Audit Office once prepared a damning report related to the actions of the Department of Social Rights of the Generalitat between 2016 and 2024. It detailed that it improperly paid 4.7 million euros to young people formerly under guardianship between September 2019 and December 2022. Although the beneficiaries were not entitled to the benefits, the contracted entities that were supposed to control the payments did not do so.
Within the framework of collaboration between Anti-Fraud and the Prosecutor’s Office, it will also be the latter who analyzes, when it concludes, the conclusions of the second investigation that is still open by Anti-Fraud and which concerns the possible existence of phantom places.
Read more Meloni takes advantage of the Ceuta crisis to push her migration agenda
