The mystery of subsidies in Catalonia: one million missing data
A young man collects all the aid in the Principality, but a technical problem prevents access to the full information
BarcelonaGathering all grants awarded in Catalonia on a website that acts as a search engine, filtered by beneficiary and knowing who grants them. This is what the 32-year-old Gerard Martínez Adsuar, a native of Caldes de Montbui, has done, who has revolutionized public debate this week with the virality of Subvencions.cat. Why? The website suddenly stopped working and was restored a few days later. However, the shutdown caused the loss of one million records. These are data that ceased to be accessible from the Generalitat's portals. The Government has justified this by problems with the "dumping" of data which, they assure, will be resolved soon. The leader of the PP, Alejandro Fernández, brought the matter into Parliament this very week when he accused the Government of "censoring websites," lamenting the "waste" of resources on grants, referring to the nearly 5 billion euros distributed annually. The deputy spokesperson for Junts in Congress, Josep Maria Cruset, also addressed the issue on social media, asking the executive to "clarify what they have removed from the database" and stating that, "otherwise, any other information the Government may publish will lack credibility." On social media, however, the Aliança Catalana environment has been the most vocal through platforms like E-Notícies and Catalunya Woke. Now, beyond the political reactions, how does Subvencions.cat work and what do the disappeared data explain?
Gerard Martínez Adsuar created a digestible website about grants and another about public procurement. In conversation with ARA, he assures that he decided to move forward with this portal "for transparency," because "public data is not the same as accessible data." "This is a weekend project. I did it on a lazy Sunday; I dedicated eight hours to the procurement website and eight more to the grants website," he maintains. This project,which has a lifespan of just over ten days, has been developed with such speed thanks to artificial intelligence, which allows for the "automation" of data, he explains. The programmer, a self-taught individual with a degree in business administration and management, has a company called Cienciadedades.cat and creates applications focusing on data analysis.
Martínez Adsuar has been "surprised" by the virality and political impact of what he has done in his free time, after achieving 30,000 generated pages from 5,000 users in one day. Despite this, he understands the debate due to the large amount of resources involved. He admits to having had "a lot of resonance, especially in the far-right" – and says he does not support them in any way – but wonders why transparency does not concern the left. "There are people who pointed to groups like Muslim associations or anti-homophobia groups; I think we need to debate without singling out collectives," he concludes, criticizing the rants published on X.
The website shutdown
Why did the website stop working two days ago? The conflict with the Government lies in the fact that access to grant data was cut off. It was Tuesday at half past one when the data from the Generalitat's Department of Economy, which the website relies on, went from being public to "private and inaccessible" and "without apparent reason." Initially, Martínez Adsuar found the "technical problems" argument without further explanation "strange." On Wednesday afternoon, access to the data was restored, although one million records were lost, according to Martínez Adsuar, which coincide with grants awarded by municipalities.
Sources from the Department of Economy make it clear to ARA that "it is a technical problem that is in the process of being resolved," but that for now they cannot "specify the timeframe" even though efforts are being made to resolve it "as soon as possible." They also maintain that "grant data concerning local government are available, while the incident with the Generalitat's platform is being resolved, on the National Database of Grants." And they emphasize that the only ones not yet available on the Economy website are those from the municipalities. They recall, in this regard, that since Wednesday "the Generalitat's grant data are once again available."
From Conflict to Debate
The journalist specializing in new technologies, Albert Cuesta, assures this newspaper that he does not know exactly what the problem was in the data migration process, but he does know that the Center for Telecommunications and Information Technologies, responsible for fixing incidents, has commented that the Generalitat is changing all its websites and that this involves file changes. "The fall of this into an import error is plausible, without any intention of hiding it," he concludes. Furthermore, he comments that the suspicion of hiding it is dispelled by the fact that the information is available in another database. "Another thing is why we have to have two databases – he states – with the risk that they are not synchronized." He also points out that the list of grants now being criticized has been around for a long time.
