Murad overcharged for works at PAM Diamante.

Marrapá Blog - More than R$ 2 million were embezzled from public funds during the renovation of the PAM Diamante Hospital. The shortfall was revealed in an audit conducted by the State Secretariat of Transparency and Control, which found crimes and acts of impropriety committed by former secretary Ricardo Murad in the contracting of the works. The total cost of the renovation and adaptation of the unit was R$ 13.784.618,05. Even with this multimillion-dollar sum, the hospital already has serious infrastructure problems.

The audit revealed irregularities such as improper waiver of bidding procedures, absence of a basic project plan, absence of a technical professional responsible for the architectural design, duplicate items in cost spreadsheets, overpricing, and bid rigging. The works at the Pam Diamante hospital began six months after Ricardo Murad took over as Secretary of Health. The hospital was closed for renovations, and the company Lastro Engenharia Incorporações e Indústria Ltda was contracted, without bidding, for R$ 4.699.818,30.

The project, contracted on November 13, 2009, was supposed to last only six months and be completed by May 2010, as that was the legal limit for emergency contracts. However, the work dragged on for almost five years. Furthermore, the contracting of Lastro Engenharia Incorporações e Indústria Ltda was illegal. The law did not allow emergency contracting under those circumstances, and the reports justifying the situation were dated 2007, making it no longer possible to contract without a bidding process.

Only the crime of improper waiver of bidding implies a prison sentence of 3 to 5 years and a fine, according to Law No. 8.666/93. However, other serious problems were found by the auditors, such as the fact that all proposals presented identical spreadsheets, even though there was no basic project in the process, and were allegedly prepared in just three days, evidencing fraud in the contracting to benefit Lastro Engenharia.

The audit also found that some items in the spreadsheet were measured twice, meaning the company benefiting from the contract awarded without bidding would receive payment twice for the same service. Worse, overpricing was found in several items when compared to the cost table of the National System for Research on Costs and Indices of Civil Construction (Sinapi), resulting in uneconomical contracting. Some items were contracted with up to 93% overpricing.

Another serious irregularity was that the contract, awarded without bidding, was concluded without the Health Department preparing the final acceptance certificate for the work. Since the contract was followed by others, the lack of measurement makes it impossible to verify whether the contracted and paid services were actually performed.

After a contract awarded without bidding for R$ 4,6 million, Lastro Engenharia was again contracted by the Health Department during the administration of former Secretary Ricardo Murad to perform similar services at Pam Diamante, through Contract No. 99/2011. This time the contract was awarded through a bidding process, in the competitive modality, but an audit by the Secretariat of Transparency and Control indicates that there was a violation of the principle of competitiveness because the dates of the publication of the notice in newspapers were not proven in the processes, and only Lastro Engenharia participated in the bidding.

In this second contract, there were irregularities in the signing of several addendums. In one of them, services that had already been performed were contracted. In another addendum, the Health Department increased the contract value by a percentage higher than that permitted by law. The audit also considered the justifications for some addendums to be improper, as they claimed difficulties regarding workforce training and material supply, demonstrating that the company did not have the technical and economic capacity to have been admitted to the bidding process.

The audit revealed delays in the execution of services. The contract, signed on May 17, 2011, stipulated that the works should be completed by May 16, 2012, but the company only ceased operations at the construction site on August 14, 2013, with more than a year of unjustified delay. Furthermore, a photographic report evidenced losses to public funds due to the partial non-execution of the contract.

Despite Lastro Engenharia not having completed the contracted work, former Secretary Ricardo Murad did not take the appropriate legal action against the company, unjustifiably failing to initiate proceedings to apply the sanctions provided for in Law No. 8.666/93, which could have required Lastro to pay a fine and prevented it from entering into new contracts with the Public Administration.

Another irregularity found was the payment for part of the work with BNDES funds without the bank's authorization and without the approval of the management company contracted by the Government of Maranhão. Even though the Health Secretariat had a contract in force with the company Proenge Engenharia e Projetos Ltda for this purpose, the auditors observed that no oversight was carried out in several processes for measuring the services paid for.