“I opened one or two and one of them broke.” The head of occupational risk prevention at Madrid Salud, Mario Tabasco, explained this Friday to the judge in the mask case that it took him very little time to realize that the masks that Luis Medina and Alberto Luceño had brought were not up to the standards of quality that they needed and that did not have the certificates in order, although they ended up being used. As elDiario.es has learned, this high-ranking Madrid Salud official has ratified what he already told his superiors at the Madrid City Council in april 2020one day after receiving this medical material.
The most expensive masks in Spain: poor quality, overprices and bites at the Madrid City Council
Know more
Despite this, he explained that he knows that “the masks were widely used, as far as I know there was no problem with their use.”
Today he has reiterated this message before the judge, explaining in the first place that the masks that arrived from China through the Malaysian company Leno did not have the required certificates. “It was not a European type certificate and there was an alert from the Ministry of Labor that said that everything that ECM certified in personal protection equipment was not useful”, he explained. The masks, in addition, “did not have a GB number.”
They also had problems in their composition. “The mask did not have a rubber band, visually they were not like normal masks. The ear fastening area was textile and it broke easily, ”he explained to questions from the magistrate. He has also said that they were not of the required model: “They could not be FFP2, because FFP2 is European regulations”, he has said.
The judge has launched a series of proceedings aimed at discovering whether Medina and Luceño not only deceived the Madrid City Council with the commissions that they hid and that, supposedly, inflated the price of the masks, gloves and tests that they sold to the consistory in March 2020. He also wants to know if the quality of the products was poor or much lower than that requested by the Madrid administration.
The masks came from China and Tabasco has assured that “I did not know the Chinese regulations, the European regulations were not complied with but the Chinese I ignore it.” “I do not know if they were valid or not, simply that they did not meet the requirements of the European Union, he added and later settled that” there was no communication that made me change my mind “.
To questions from the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor of the case, Luis Rodríguez Sol, Tabasco has been more specific: “There was a double problem, there was an alert in the Ministry of Labor that said that these certificates were not valid and that the four digits did not exist”, has explained. That criterion, he added today before the judge, did not change over time. Nobody told him that these masks came from Medina and Luceño or that the cousin of the mayor of the city had intervened in their contact.
In the summary of this case of masks, there is a report from the Municipal Police that confirmed that the masks of Medina and Luceño were comparable to FFP2. Regarding this, the head of occupational risk prevention at Madrid Salud has said that he is not aware that the Police “said that the masks had the necessary robustness.”
www.eldiario.es