The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office is investigating alleged irregularities in the granting of aid by the Generalitat for young people who have aged out of care, after the Catalonia Anti-Fraud Office warned of a lack of control over the companies responsible for monitoring these benefits. According to legal sources reported to EFE, the public prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation into the line of economic benefits for those who have aged out of care and the possible existence of “phantom places” for the accommodation of young people, for which it has requested the collaboration of the Catalonia Anti-Fraud Office (OAC).
In fact, Anti-Fraud was already investigating complaints made by a social educator about possible irregularities in the benefits of the former Directorate General for Childhood and Adolescence (DGAIA), whose management was handled by a joint venture formed by the Mercè Fontanilles Foundation and the Resilis Foundation. To the complaints of alleged irregularities in the management of benefits, filed last year, was added a report from the Audit Office that raised improper payments by the DGAIA between 2016 and 2024 to 167.5 million euros and warned of the lack of effective monitoring and control in the management of the aid.
The complaints coincided with the case of a minor who was a victim of a pedophile network in the Barcelona neighborhood of Raval while under guardianship, which triggered a crisis that led the Government to reform the DGAIA, now called the Directorate General for the Prevention and Protection of Childhood and Adolescence (DGPPIA), and to directly assume the monitoring of economic benefits for young people under guardianship.
The Catalonia Anti-Fraud Office has completed the investigation it opened into alleged irregularities in the granting of aid to those who have aged out of care and has already sent its conclusions to the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office, in which it rules out indications of a crime in the management of economic benefits.
Although it does not find fraud in the aid, the OAC does urge the Prosecutor’s Office to investigate whether the clauses of the contracts signed with the companies responsible for managing the benefits were fulfilled, after detecting deficiencies in their monitoring. The OAC maintains a second investigation open, also in collaboration with the Prosecutor’s Office, regarding the complaint of “phantom places,” housing resources for those who have aged out of care paid for by the administration but for which there is no record of use by the young people for whom they were intended.
In this second investigation, Anti-Fraud is analyzing the documentation related to the contracts that the DGAIA signed with the companies awarded the management of the benefit. Last May, the former Minister of Social Rights and Inclusion, Mònica Martínez Bravo, announced that her department will assume the service of monitoring the economic benefits of young people who have aged out of care from January 1, 2027, and that, therefore, it will no longer be put out to tender.
Following the DGAIA crisis, several entities have filed complaints with the courts in Barcelona to request investigations into the alleged irregularities uncovered by the Audit Office and by the social educator who took the case to Anti-Fraud, to whom the Office granted protection against possible reprisals for having reported a case of alleged corruption.
Last April, a judge in Barcelona dismissed an investigation into a complaint directed against four former ministers, concluding that, in its report, the Audit Office does not point to indications of a crime, beyond “deficiencies” limited to the administrative sphere.
