As for drawing up the invoice, paying and collecting the commission, the procedure should be transparent. Exactly after a four-month investigation, the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office decided to close the case, which was kept open in connection with the commissions that the brother of the president of the Madrid community, Thomas Dia Ayuso, took for one and a half awards. A million euros to the company of a friend of both in exchange for 250,000 masks.
According to the prosecution, the whole process was legal and transparent, the president’s brother did not ask for favorable treatment for the company, there were no violations during the hiring and his commissions are completely legal. The case now lies with the European prosecutor’s office, which has to decide whether the company, where the president’s brother was an agent of the commission, sold the masks to the Madrid public for 1.5 million euros, which originally cost 500,000. And the quality of this sanitary material is sufficient indication to continue the investigation into the alleged fraud against community funds by which the regional government paid for this order.
The issue, which is still under investigation, raises some doubts: first, if the Ayusu government knew he was wearing triple-worth masks to a friend of the president who had his brother as a commission agent. As the anti-corruption organization reveals in its case, Daniel Alcazar, a businessman’s former company dedicated to the textile sector, paid more than 540,000 euros to buy masks and transport them from China to the IFEMA market in Madrid. The regional bailiff, under the contracts provided to the prosecutor, paid more than 1.5 million euros in invoices, which was one of the most lucrative purchases of masks in the first weeks of the pandemic. In those days, the Madrid community signed thirty orders for better-priced masks.
The regional government accepted only one of six offers from Thomas Dia Iusso to help the company of Daniel Alcazar, a lifelong friend of the family. The community refused, for example, to buy hundreds of thousands of dresses from the same company because they considered the price “excessive” and refused to “prepay part of the price as requested by Privat,” the prosecutor’s office said. That is, there were filters on the product label, but the triple masks in the market price were overcome.
In the case of the Madrid City Council masks, the same anti-corruption prosecution has always stressed that Luis Medina and Alberto Lucenio were negotiating their millionaire commissions behind the council, as well as raising prices to optimize the loot. This, according to investigators of the Municipal Mask case, is part of fraud and alleged fraud. In the case of the Madrid community, the prosecution did not specify whether the regional administration knew that he was an agent of the commission and, in particular, that it was the brother of President Isabel Dias Ayuso.
In this case, the prosecution considered that the 300% profit of the supplier company is not a possible fraud and explains this by the international market situation and the difficulties in finding medical supplies and even comparing prices. The Thomas Diaz Aiuso Commission, which has been dedicated to the healthcare sector for more than two decades, is justified, the public ministry said in a statement. According to Anti-Corruption, he added “the value of this company’s commercial process with its knowledge of health management and the healthcare market, suppliers and potential customers, as well as the features and specifications of the products in demand.”
Nor did he believe that Priviet Sportive, a company owned by the Ayuso brothers’ childhood friend, had no previous experience in the medical equipment or healthcare business in general, or that he was in a delicate financial position. In fact, Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor Alejandro Luzon justifies this in his decree: “This is something that, on the other hand, was not uncommon in the days when many companies around the world, especially textiles, were doing business temporarily. “Commercialization of protective material against COVID-19,” he said. In the case of Medina and Luceno, this inexperience in the world of health is seen as another indicator of City Council fraud.
The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office is also exploring the possibility that the company may have encountered incompatibility in concluding contracts with the Madrid public and understands that there were no obstacles as the law on public sector contracts only controls family relationships between managers. The company and the public agency that signs the contract and not the commission agents who are responsible for managing the company when deciding which door to knock on. In addition, he maintains that the president of the Madrid community was not part of the specific body that managed the contract.
None of Isabel Diaz Ayuso’s relatives are responsible for Priviet Sportive, but the role her brother played remains beyond the scope of this law: he worked as a commission agent and facilitator, as the prosecution itself admits, he played. A fundamental role so that the company earned that one and a half million euros from the public line. The aim was for Priviet to use “its experience and logistical and financial capabilities to import from the Asian market,” the prosecution itself said. Thomas Dia Ayuso was in a secret copy of the e-mail, so officials were unaware of his existence, but he was observing the relationship between the company and the Madrid public, offering the prosecution no version. That repeats the president of the community Isabel Dia Ayuso knew nothing about the contract.
In other words, in order for the prosecution to consider that Priviet Sportive could not have a contract with the Madrid public, the company must have been owned by Thomas Diaz Aiuso, who is protected from any suspicion at the anti-corruption briefing because he. Acted only as an agent of the Commission. “It must be its administrator or shareholder of more than 10% and, in addition, there will be a conflict of interest with a contracting authority that is not the president of the community or its governing council,” the prosecutor’s office said. . Consequently, the presence of a commission agent associated with the politicians who lead the administration does not prevent the company that hires him from receiving a commission from the institution.
Nor is it a rebuke to Isabel Diaz Ayus because, on the one hand, there is no evidence that she pressured any member of the regional executive to hire a company from which her brother was paid, but she was not in the organizations that managed the contract or. “He did not interfere in the proceedings, given that the Governing Council is not a contracting authority of the Community of Madrid,” the prosecutor’s office said.
Following this order from the prosecution, the court in Spain was closed, although the investigation is still open at European level. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office, which has challenged the Spanish Ministry of Public Control over the case, is continuing to investigate whether the purchase of triple-priced masks at market price using public funds could lead to any kind of illegality.
At this time, the European body has not made public the lawsuits and investigations carried out during these months, but the anti-corruption prosecutor’s office has sent the most important evidence it has collected. “A copy of the statements made in this investigation process [diferentes testigos] dad. By Thomas Diaz Ayuso, with the reports of the auxiliary subdivisions and divisions attached to this prosecutor’s office and various documents, ”he explains.
The results of an investigation in Spain confirm that Ayuso’s brother collected money from a successful bidder in the Madrid community, as made public by former PP president Pablo Casado, for which he asked the president of the region for an explanation. But prosecutors say there is no basis for the complaint because there is no evidence of illegality or that the family relationship between Isabel Dia Ayuso and her brother had any impact on the mask contract that her government imposed on both friends. Nor in the payments of the latter to Thomas Dia Aius himself.
Source: El Diario
