The judge decides not to extend the investigation into the Osakidetza OPE

The judge instructing the case for the alleged leak of exams in the Osakidetza OPE 2016-2017 has ruled: not to extend the study for another six months in this case, as requested by ESK and LAB, so a decision is expected to be made in the autumn on whether or not to open a trial against twenty defendants.

The trade union ESK, acting in both this case and LAB, has reported the order issued by the head of the Investigative Court No. 2 of Vitoria-Gasteiz, in which it refuses to proceed with this investigation after two previous extensions of each given six months.

The latter started in early February and ends this month, so these unions had requested another semester to request more documents and witness evidence, a request that has now been denied.

However, they hope that an agreement will be reached in September on the subpoena of witnesses, as they have requested, before an injunction is issued deciding whether to drop the case because there is no evidence of a crime or to open an oral trial.

Over the past six months, the exams of the OPE’s 21 specialties were analyzed to find out whether they contained “keywords” that appeared “underlined and in capital letters” and that “identified at first glance the people who scored good,” such as in the opinion of these unions happened to that of Traumatology.

ESK understands that with this decision the court will put an end to this “complex file, which has dragged on over time, which has created uncertainty for all those people who have participated in these selection processes and is not ‘sine die can be extended”.

However, he believes that a more intensive investigation should have been conducted to get “a deeper clarification of the reported facts” because “the legal implications go beyond the people and the facts” investigated so far.