The president of the Community of Madrid, Isabel Díaz Ayuso, during an act held on February 28. Alejandro Martínez Vélez (Europa Press)
The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office has decided to shelve another of the investigations opened against the Government of Pedro Sánchez for emergency contracts and aid granted during the pandemic, which were opened as a result of a complaint filed by the PP in response to inquiries about the profits obtained by the brother of President Isabel Díaz Ayuso with the sale of masks to the Community of Madrid.
The public ministry has now closed the investigations into the two files of the National Institute of Health Management (Ingesa), under the Ministry of Health, to buy 92 million nitrile gloves from the company Member of the Tribe for 9.4 million euros .
A few months ago, the Prosecutor's Office already filed two proceedings that pointed to Sánchez's parents and Minister Nadia Calviño.
In a resolution dated this February 1, to which EL PAÍS has had access, Anti-Corruption concludes that it has found no indications of "criminal offenses", nor the existence of irregularities "with sufficient relevance" to continue with the PP's complaint about Member of the Tribe, which put on the table crimes of prevarication, negotiations prohibited to officials, influence peddling and embezzlement of public funds.
The department headed by the chief prosecutor Alejandro Luzón has made this decision after obtaining reports from the Civil Guard and the Treasury, which refute the popular thesis.
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By order of Ayuso, the spokesman for the PP parliamentary group in the Madrid Assembly, Alfonso Serrano, denounced that an "excessive price" had been agreed with Member of the Tribe for each glove unit, "with an estimated cost between 25% and 500% higher than that offered by other providers”.
In addition, the popular ones assured that the company "had a corporate purpose that has nothing to do with the supply of sanitary products";
and that Health advanced a part of the money that, after the company failed to meet the delivery deadline, had not been recovered.
However, on the one hand, the Prosecutor's Office states that, after the outbreak of the pandemic in March 2020, the company expanded its corporate purpose and included the "wholesale purchase of pharmaceutical products and medicines" - the Ingesa contracts were awarded A few months after the start of the crisis: May 14 and June 1.
The public ministry also rules out "extra costs" in the gloves based on a comparative table prepared by the Treasury with the "prices of similar contracts, both from Ingensa and from the corresponding services of the autonomous communities", obtained from the Public Sector Contracting Platform and the Court of Accounts.
"It is concluded that the reported extra cost does not exist," says Anticorrupción forcefully, before adding: "Although there are purchases for lower prices than these two contracts, there are also purchases for higher amounts, even in much later purchases (November 2020 ).
And the average price at which the acquisitions were made by Town Halls with more than 300,000 inhabitants was higher (0.12 euros), according to the report of the Court of Auditors”.
At this point, the public ministry recalls that, in the two files granted to Member of the Tribe, 1.107 euros and 0.097 euros were paid for each glove.
Finally, regarding the money advanced, Anticorruption stresses that Ingesa opened the corresponding file to suspend the contract with the company and claim the funds delivered.
What's more, Member of the Tribe submitted allegations and stated that he was unable to deliver the material on time because his Turkish supplier had not forwarded it to him.
All this was also made known to the Council of State, which did not detect "any defect in the processing of the file."
In this sense, the Prosecutor's Office adds that said body concluded that Ingesa's actions were "correct" and "does not imply failure to observe adequate precautions in the management of public funds."
Third setback to the PP of Madrid
The Anti-Corruption file inflicts another setback on the strategy of Isabel Díaz Ayuso, who launched a counterattack against the Government of Spain when the Prosecutor's Office opened an investigation into the hit that her brother gave with the sale of masks to the Community of Madrid during the pandemic.
In this case, the public ministry ruled out influence peddling and illegalities, but concluded that Tomás Díaz Ayuso pocketed 234,000 euros as an intermediary for a company that sold 250,000 masks to the Ministry of Health for 1.5 million euros.
Surrounded by that scandal, the president tried to divert attention and ordered her deputies to file a macro-complaint against the Sánchez Executive.
"We are going to start investigating everyone," said Ayuso, challenging.
So, based only on press articles, the regional PP brought to the Prosecutor's Office up to 13 central Administration contracts with seven companies.
Once received, Alejandro Luzón, Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor, opened seven lines of investigation in April 2022 —each one focused on one of the winning companies.
But, until now, it has not transpired that any has come to fruition.
What's more, three of them have already been shelved.
The public ministry has closed this February the investigations on Member of the Tribe.
Before, he did the same with two other lines of research.
First, in July 2022, Luzón finalized the inquiries about the subsidies to the company Industrias Plásticas Playbol, which the Madrid PP linked to the parents of Pedro Sánchez.
After analyzing this case, the Chief Anti-Corruption Prosecutor stressed that the denunciation of the popular ones was not sustained: there was a "clear absence of incriminating element" and it did not have the most "minimum basis of evidence."
In October the second setback came to Ayuso.
The Prosecutor's Office archived the investigation into the concession to the company Beedigital (formerly called Páginas Amarillas Soluciones Digitales) of a public tender, an endorsement and accreditation as a digitizing agent of the Digital Kit Program.
In this case, the Madrid PP targeted the first vice president, Nadia Calviño, arguing that her partner worked as marketing director
of
that company.
But the Prosecutor's Office did not find any indication of a "supposed favorable treatment", of the existence of irregularities or of the "direct or indirect intervention" of Calviño in these awards.
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