The president says that this money was not a “commission” for obtaining the administration contract but for the “management” to buy the material in China | The regional government does not clarify why a company without any experience was used and what was the exact role of Tomás Díaz Ayuso in the operation
Isabel Díaz Ayuso tries to defend the cleaning of the famous mask contract, but the gaps regarding that award to a company with no experience in the health sector and the exact role of her brother in that transaction persist. The president acknowledged today that Tomás Díaz Ayuso turned an invoice of 55,850 euros plus VAT on June 30, 2020 against the company of his friend Priviet Sportive. The Madrid leader assured that this money was not “a commission for obtaining the administration contract”, but rather it was the “collection of the steps taken to obtain the material in China and its transfer to Madrid”.
“It is a consideration for his work, not a commission for intermediation,” added Ayuso, who defended that the operation in which his brother participated allowed the Community of Madrid to obtain FFP2 and FFP3 masks at 5 euros “when the prices at that time (on the world market) they reach 10.5 euros».
But that invoice was not the only one that the brother issued in 2020 to Priviet Sportive. There were three others, as Ayuso admitted this Friday, who refused to explain the reason for these new payments, alleging that they have “no relationship with the Community of Madrid.”
Be that as it may, file A/SUM-011225/2020 is not, of course, a typical administration contract. And not only because it was a finger award and by “emergency procedure” in full alarm. In reality, the Community of Madrid, like practically all administrations, resorted to this figure almost 5,000 times in 2020 to obtain medical supplies in the first months of the coronavirus pandemic.
And it is that the contract for the masks that the PP uses as artillery against Isabel Díaz Ayuso, apart from the explanations this Friday by the president and her advisers, still has many shadows and doubts beyond the exceptional moment in which it was signed , on April 1, 2020, in the midst of a global crisis due to lack of masks.
The first great unknown that neither the president nor the Ministry of Health has yet cleared up is why the regional government resorted to get masks from Priviet Sportive SL, the company of Daniel Alcázar, a childhood friend of Tomás and Isabel, when this company I had no experience in the healthcare sector. What’s more, he still doesn’t have it.
“gentleman and lady”
Priviet, a small firm with only eight employees, has as its corporate purpose the “manufacture, manufacture and wholesale and retail sale of articles for men’s and women’s clothing and headgear”.
The profile of this company, which was usually dedicated to the sale of t-shirts and sports equipment, is, however, strange, since it had an “expansion of corporate purpose” for something totally different from textile manufacturing: “agricultural exploitation, forestry, livestock or hunting of rustic farms».
Be that as it may, Priviet Sportive, which had never worked with the Community of Madrid before and has never done so since, won a contract of 1,512,000 euros (with VAT). The award was signed on April 1, 2020 and only ten days later that company, without any experience and in a context of a global mask crisis, began to deliver the promised 250,000 FPP2 and FPP3 face masks to IFEMA.
The award from the regional government accounted for more than a third of its sales for Priviet in 2020, since the company of the friend of the Ayusos invoiced 4.3 million that year.
“Proceedings”
Be that as it may, Priviet Sportive, which had never touched (and has never done so again) the health business, ended up paying Tomás Díaz Ayuso for what the president has called “managements.”
But the truth is that Ayuso’s brother, unlike his friend Daniel Alcázar, did have the ability to achieve the ‘miracle’ of obtaining masks in the midst of a crisis: he is or has been an administrator, manager or commercial director of at least five companies of the health sector and with a long history of importing medical material: Sismédica SL, Gala Médica SL, Pulsión Medical Systems AG, Mindray Medical and Cardiac Science.
However, none of these companies, with much more turnover and specialization than Priviet, opted for a contract with the Community. An award of this type to a company directly related to Tomás Díaz Ayuso would have set off all the alarms immediately because those firms were already on the radar of the opposition.
What exactly did Ayuso’s brother do to get the masks? That is the big question still not resolved. Why does the PP continue to insist that Tomás Díaz Ayuso pocketed around 286,000 euros, and not 55,850 euros, for that “intermediation” that no one denies anymore? Was the brother able to use his friend’s company to win the award and circumvent the high-ranking legislation that prohibits the hiring of relatives up to the fourth degree?
Date change
There are other minor issues in that contract that call the experts’ attention. The Madrid administration made a correction to the award document. In principle, the signing date that appeared in the contract was March 24, however, it was later postponed to April 1 without stating the reason for the change in date.
Another of the striking issues is the round unit price per mask (5 euros), something unusual in purchases of this depth in which the last cent is discussed to the maximum and especially considering that the masks were of two different types (FPP2 and FPP3) with different prices in the market. In fact, all the prices of masks in April 2020 provided this Friday by Ayuso to defend the advantage of the contract have decimals.