The Senegalese with a million euros sneaked botched fakes into the Basque health system

• Basque Country A Senegalese collects more than a million euros in social aid with 62 false identities

• Fraud The Senegalese of the million euros received aid since 2008 with false registers in four Basque municipalities

ON

, the Senegalese citizen who has swindled more than a million euros in Basque social aid, resorted to gross manipulation of official documents to use 62 false identities with which to collect more than a million euros.

ON, on provisional release after being arrested on March 21 by the

National Police

Despite the version offered by the

, the falsifications of Health documents, the 22 manipulated passports, the sublease documents and the facility for multiple registration at the same address facilitated by the Basque city councils made the fraud possible.

Among the 62 false identities, ON used those of several

compatriots who, without residing in the

, became recipients of the

(RGI) and the

(PCV).

According to the documentation provided by the Immigration Brigade to the

of

, one of the false identities used by O.N was that of

.

The Gambian immigrant -whose entry into

is not recorded according to police sources- began to collect Basque social aid in the first months of 2020 and maintained it until mid-2021.

demanded his presence and ON did not attend the appointment but, days later, he presented a crude document from

for an alleged admission to the

in Bilbao.

The document was not only admitted but also allowed O. N to continue collecting social assistance from a Basque savings bank.

Osakidetza's presumed report also included easily detectable errors such as

or the absence of a release date for the presumed hospital admission.

The agents of the Immigration Brigade also verified that identical reports were used as supporting documents by ON with other false identities to continue collecting aid from the Basque Government.

The documentation obtained by the investigation by the National Police also includes crude room sublease contracts that allowed ON to add to the 625 euros per month from the RGI another 250 euros for housing assistance in each of the false identities that he used since 2008.

Despite the social alarm generated and the demands for explanations by

and

, the Vice-Lehendakari and Socialist Minister of Labor

publicly acknowledged yesterday that she is unaware of the origin of an investigation carried out by the National Police in an autonomous community in which the

is the integral police with almost 8,000 agents deployed.

Mendia, who promotes a new regulation that continues to guarantee universal and indefinite aid, warned yesterday that the control over false passports is a responsibility of the National Police and not a function of the almost 1,000 workers of the Basque Employment Service.

"I want to congratulate the National Police but it has taken them 10 years to unravel it, which means that it was not an easy plot," Mendia said yesterday in a communication strategy that aims to convey an unreal image of the fraud perpetrated by ON with the help of another 23 foreigners who provided him with different types of punctual coverage.

Police sources warned, after Mendia's words, that the investigation began at the end of 2021 without specifying the circumstances that gave rise to the first indications until the Bilbao Investigating Court 10 began to request information already in 2022 from the Basque Service of Employment.

The Basque Government estimates that in 2021 267 cases of social aid fraud were detected and in the first five months of this year 224 have already been counted.

Vice-Lehendakari Mendia described the volume of fraud in Basque social aid as "minimal" one day after the Government Delegation made public the result of the operation by the Immigration Brigade.

Delegate

(

) froze the communication of the important police operation revealed by this newspaper for 24 hours.

The deputy lehendakari did not want yesterday to detail the internal "control mechanisms" to which the spokesman for the Basque Government

last Tuesday after revealing the biggest fraud in the history of Euskadi in social aid.

and that question opposition parties.

The head of Employment, accompanied by the general director of Lanbide

, recalled the obligation of all officials to notify the Police of any indication of fraud.

"Lanbide is not a police station, it is a public employment service," Mendia responded to doubts about the mechanisms of political control of social aid in the Basque Country.

Following the investigation by the National Police, the Basque Employment Service is changing the procedure used until now to transmit their "suspicion", in the words of Mendia, to the direction of the Basque Employment Service.

The workers have sent dozens of indications internally without having proof of the management carried out by the Lanbide management.

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