The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has opened proceedings following a complaint by a former senior official of the National Cancer Research Center (CNIO) last June, which has plunged the institution into a new crisis, as elDiario.es has been able to confirm and the newspaper has reported. ABC.
The 120-page complaint, to which you have had access elDiario.esoffers data on an alleged network of companies around former manager Juan Arroyo in which former employees of the center participate and that would have withdrawn “between 20 and 25 million euros” from the fight against cancer.
After learning of these new details, the CNIO Board of Trustees approved this Tuesday the dismissal of the former manager, Juan Arroyo, as vice director of economic affairs, a position that he continued to hold after his resignation from management in January 2025 together with the scientific director Maria Blasco. According to sources familiar with the process, the departure of two positions of trust, the general secretary and the deputy to management, is taken for granted.
A complaint that comes from afar
The new complaint resumes and expands the accusations of corruption against the manager and his entourage that had already been presented by Maria Blasco and, even earlier, by the former president of the works council between 2018 and 2023, Ana Hernández. This time the initiative comes from a person who worked closely with Arroyo for years and who provides new details of an alleged operation of administrative, logistical and computer contracts that, according to him, were rigged or inflated by up to 400%.
At the end of January, in the midst of a whirlwind of accusations about his management, Blasco informed the Prosecutor’s Office of the existence of a series of minor contracts with a total amount that exceeds 1.5 million euros in the first quarter of 2024 alone and that corresponded to “a coincident group of companies that in turn share administrators among themselves, which casts suspicion on the legality of this contracting mechanism.”
Despite indications of possible irregularities in the hiring, through internal communications and complaints, both the board and the Ministry of Science maintained a passive attitude that only led to the dismissal of the scientific director and the former manager in the face of an unprecedented media scandal. In this second crisis, the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities knew months in advance of the existence of the complaint but did not take action until the scandal became known in the media.
Source: www.eldiario.es
