Thursday, March 28

Podemos asks to charge Mayor Almeida’s cousin and to explain his contact with the commission agents


The popular accusation of Podemos has asked the judge in the mask case to call Carlos Martínez-Almeida, cousin of the mayor of Madrid who facilitated the contact of the commissioners with the consistory, to testify as accused. In his statement this Monday, Luis Medina Abascal has detailed before the magistrate how a friend put him in contact with the alderman’s relative and how he provided him with the email address of Elena Collado, a high municipal position that managed the hiring to buy material in the first weeks of the pandemic in Spain.

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For the popular accusation of Podemos, the link between Luis Medina and the City Council was a cousin of the mayor, “a personal circumstance that could have provided the investigated Mr. Luis Medina with direct access to the person whose functions were, at the time of the facts, those of management of purchases of the sanitary material”. For this reason, Ione Belarra’s party understands that “the statement by D. Carlos Martínez-Almeida is pertinent, useful and necessary for clarifying the facts.”

He also explains in his brief that he must go to testify as an investigator “for a better guarantee of his procedural rights”, and not only as a witness. For Podemos, “it is proven” that Luis Medina got a commission of 900,000 euros “simply for getting that contact” and they understand that the mayor’s cousin could “very provisionally” incur in a crime of influence peddling, which punishes an individual who influences in “a public official or authority taking advantage of any situation derived from his personal relationship with him or with another public official or authority to obtain a resolution that may directly or indirectly generate an economic benefit for himself or for a third party.”

The magistrate himself yesterday showed his reservations about this management explained by the son of the Duke of Feria. “Medina gave you the phone number, nothing more and nothing less, of the resource coordinator, not the one at the window, no, the one of the resource coordinator. Do you think this is normal?” the judge asked businessman Alberto Luceño.

Luis Medina explained yesterday that he contacted a friend, expressed his desire to speak with someone from the City Council or the Community of Madrid and she gave him the telephone number of the mayor’s cousin. After a telephone conversation, Carlos Martínez-Almeida gave him the email of Elena Collado, budget coordinator and senior official of the consistory who at that time managed the purchase of medical supplies for emergency processing through the Madrid municipal funeral home.

The first mention of this branch of the mask case came in the Anti-Corruption complaint, when the Prosecutor’s Office stated that Luis Medina came to the City Hall taking advantage of his “friendship” with a relative of the mayor. That relative is Carlos Martínez-Almeida, a lawyer, and from the first moment the mayor has affirmed that he never knew about this contact and that this was the only participation of his cousin in this whole matter.

Podemos also requests in its brief that the person who put Luis Medina in contact with Carlos Martínez-Almeida testify as a witness, along with the directors of the bank offices in which his millionaire commissions were deposited between March and April 2020 from Malaysia.



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