The Madrid City Council has issued a statement after elDiario.es has exclusively revealed that the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office is investigating the alleged collection of million-dollar commissions by businessmen from various medical material contracts in the first weeks of the pandemic. The consistory directed by José Luis Martínez-Almeida explains that it is the “first interested in knowing if there has been any crime with these contracts” and that, in addition, it is “providing the maximum collaboration with the Justice and will continue to do so until they are clarified all the facts.”
As this newspaper has explained, the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office has a magnifying glass on two of the three contracts awarded in the last week of March 2020 to a company based in Malaysia to bring medical supplies to Madrid: masks, antibody tests and gloves. . The investigators investigate whether two businessmen who mediated in the operation received, between the two of them, six million euros in commissions for contracts that did not reach 11 million euros between the two.
Throughout this investigation, the City Council has provided various documentation at the request of the Prosecutor’s Office and a senior official who took charge of the hiring has appeared as a witness. The contracts at that time were channeled through the municipal funeral company and, explains the City Council, “all of them in price according to supply and demand at the time”. The Court of Auditors has reflected in a report that the large municipalities of Spain paid very different prices and in some cases with differences of more than 10 euros per antibody test unit, as was the case in Madrid.
Precisely, the City Council adds in this statement that “all the COVID emergency contracts have been sent to the Court of Auditors” and recalls that the contracts investigated “were approved by the board of directors of the municipal Funeral Home company unanimously from all the groups politicians”
The City Council of the capital recalls that they had a conflict with these intermediaries and the supplier company based in Malaysia when one of the contracts, that of the sale of gloves, went wrong: “A third party, related to the gloves, part of what was returned was returned. paid for not being the model agreed upon in the purchase”, he explains. “We must remember that in March 2020, the essential personnel of the city council, police, health or funeral company, among others, needed to be provided with personal protective equipment at the worst moment of the pandemic, to carry out their work,” he explains.
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