The trial of Luis Medina and Alberto Luceño will already be seen for sentence when in March five years of the confinement of the Spaniards are completed by the Pandemia of the COVID-19. Next Tuesday starts the first view that judges crimes related to the sale of health material during the most dramatic event since the civil war. The two entrepreneurs face 9 years in prison (Medina) and 15 (look) for, among other crimes, the scam of fattening up to 60% the price of masks that saved lives and for which the City Council of Madrid paid a record among the big Spanish cities.
Pandemia caused a flow of money that came out of public coffers in record time to try to stop the avalanche of deaths. It was land paid for the commission agents who, in the middle of the panic of the citizens locked in their homes, began to make calls.
Over time the complaints against voracity and opportunism were coming but the Prosecutor’s Office established a thick line between what was considered a lack of ethics and crime. Waiting for how the Koldo case evolves, the trial for the six million that Medina and Luceño pocketed is an island among a sea of archived procedures or that did not even become a judicial case. The 234,000 euros obtained by Tomás Díaz Ayuso, brother of the president of the Community of Madrid, is one of his main examples of public money that flowed to private hands without any impact on the courts.
The secret investigation of the Anti -Corruption Prosecutor had spoiled when Eldiario.es published on March 31 that the specialized body investigated the ball of Naty Abascal’s son and the former Duke of Fair and another businessman, his friend. Of the 11 million paid by the Madrid City Council for the material, the two investigated had remained more than half. The Consistory did not sign a higher purchase of material throughout the health crisis.
The investigation proceedings had begun at the end of 2020, 17 months earlier, but anti -corruption did not decide to file a complaint in the court awaiting the improbable response of a rogatory commission sent to Malaysia. The departure of the secret revealed that the organ led by Alejandro Luzón presented the complaint the day after the exclusive of Eldiario.es.
The cause brings together another peculiarity: the administration involved is an accusation and not accused. Although the popular action, exercised by more Madrid, PSOE and Pode Adolfo Carretero, ruled out the consistory and considered him at all times victim of deception.
The scam, the Gordian knot
The deception, the scam. Here resides the Gordian knot that will unravel the court in its sentence. The next paragraph of the anti -corruption accusation brief summarizes his thesis: “The intention of both defendants was to enrich themselves exaggerated at the expense of the aforementioned situation of extreme need and lack of health materials, selling the products for a price much higher than the It was offered by the suppliers, and this, as a consequence of the imposition of exorbitant commissions that maintained hidden at all times to the buyer, who convinced that they acted moved for altruistic reasons, without obtaining any benefit from the operation. ”
The 16 million dollars left the municipal company of Funeral Services, the public entity dependent on the Consistory that had the funds to face the immediate payment. And they did not go to the accounts of Medina and Luceño but to that of the company Malasia Leno, which supposedly had the factories or the contact in China. From an account of this company, with the already popular San Chin Choon in front, transfers with the commissions came out. The defendants claim that if the City Council paid Leno and the supplier agreed with them, nothing can object to the payer.
Luis Medina thus collects it in her defense brief: “There was no obligation by the supplier or its intermediaries to inform the buyer about the commissions through intermediation or on any extra cost, including the manufacture of the product (…) in any Case, those responsible for the Madrid City Council who participated in the hiring, at no time were interested in knowing the existence of the commissions they received for the operation Don Alberto Luceño and Don Luis Medina ”.
The accusations, on the other hand, resort to one of the episodes of the negotiation between the City Council and the defendants to try to prove the scam. One of the three signed contracts responded to the sale of 2.5 million protection gloves that the Consistory would distribute among the sanitary dependents of its administration. The price would be 2 euros per gloves and these should cover up to the elbow. That was the verbal pact between Luceño and Elena Collado, former Secretary of State for Public Function with Cristóbal Montoro and the person that the Almeida government put to direct the purchases of the health material in the middle of the chaos of the pandemic.
However, the gloves that arrived only covered to the wrist. When Collado warned Luceño that this was not the deal, the commission agents returned more than 4 million to the City Council, making the Consistory believe that they were paying the difference between what costs some gloves and others. In reality, what they did was to renounce the hidden commission for that product, whose price was 0.39 euros, much lower than that they had sold to Madrid. The gloves ended up in the hands of other officials less exposed to the virus than the toilets, such as the drivers of the municipal transport company.
Those glove pallets were not the only defective material that was bought from the City Council of the Capital to Medina and Luceño. Only a spring of the three of acquired antigen test met the requirements. In total, the City Council was left with defective material worth 4 million and never denounced. He only appeared through the funeral municipal company when he learned of the anti -corruption investigation that resulted in complaint.
Defective material
To emphasize their allegedly altruistic profile, the defendants gave the City Council of Madrid 283,000 masks. The enthusiasm of the buyer with the sellers is reflected in an email that Elena Collado sent on March 23, 2020 to which it was Almeida’s right hand in the City Council, Matilde García Duarte: “Our suppliers Luis Medina and Alberto Luceño (which has Companies in China but it is Madrid) to which several medals should be given, they are taking care of the ‘coarse’ part of our needs and have renounced all kinds of commissions. ”
The mayor of Madrid himself, according to a WhatsApp audio Luis Medina to Alberto Luceño, called the first to show his gratitude for the health material. “He has called the mayor of Madrid, very affectionate and grateful,” says the aristocrat. The instruction revealed that Martínez-Almeida signed a letter of recommendation so that it could show it to the Chinese government.
The offer that Luceño had made consisted of 1 million KN95 masks (6,683 billion dollars), 2.5 million pairs of nitrile gloves (5 million dollars) and 250,000 fast tests (4,250,000 dollars). “These prices were imposed by Alberto looks at the Madrid City Council saying that it was the price set by the exporter. In doing so, he hid that a high percentage of the final price offered (approximately 60% in the case of masks, 81% in the case of gloves and almost 71% in the case of the tests) corresponded to commissions that the accused were going to perceive ”, collects the letter of conclusions of the Prosecutor’s Office.
In turn, Luceño made a document to make Luis Medina believe, his partner in the intermediation, which both would charge 1 million euros in commissions when he had actually agreed with Leno, the bad supplier, an additional commission of 2 dollars By mask. Only for this type of material, Luceño Otubvo at total 3 million euros in commissions. Between the two they achieved 4 million euros of commissions only in masks, for which they had to inflate the price by 148%. The municipalities of Barcelona and Zaragoza acquired at the same time the same masks for 2.5 euros and 1.6 euros, respectively, compared to 6.24 disbursed by Madrid.
Favors in the elite
There is a previous phase in the case that occupied a good part of the interrogations and other proceedings requested by the opposition parties and the one that anti -corruption never joined: how did the two defendants access the City of Madrid? The case has allowed to determine that Luis Medina, a prominent member of the Madrid and Sevillian jet set, resorted to the director of the private university where she had studied. She, María de la Cebosa, thought of a cousin of the mayor, Carlos, and this, her friend and companion of the State Advocacy, Matilde García Duarte, the right hand of Almeida, who facilitated the direction of Elena Collado.
All those mentioned in this contact chain will declare as witnesses in the trial, after having done it in an instructional phase. García Duarte told Judge Carretero that he never told the mayor of Madrid that his cousin had asked him about how some sellers could access the administration he directed to sell health material at a time when hundreds of deaths were recorded every day. He did not even tell him, according to his story, when the Prosecutor’s Office, 17 months before starting the case, required documentation to the City Council and cited Elena Collado. The mayor has always defended that he learned of his cousin’s participation for the first information of Eldiario.es.
FALSE POLICE DOCUMENTS AND CARNETS
The high sentence required by accusations is due to the fact that the crime of aggravated scam attributed to both must be added that of falsehood in a commercial document, another in a public document and a crime against the Treasury, always in the case of Luceño, while Medina is added only that of falsehood in a commercial document.
Both had presented a list of false documents to their respective banks to justify so bulky and immediate income and, in the case of Luceño, also recorded a false invoice. Therefore they risk being sentenced to two years in prison. Luceño will have to deal with another two -year prison request for falsification of the official document, including a CNI agent plate.
Alberto Luceño created a company on May 26, 2020, Takamaka Investments SL, which he then invoiced the work to save 1.3 million euros in taxes, by declaring as income from the company what he should have included in his IRPF .
If the prosecutor’s thesis prosper, Medina and Luceño must compensate the Madrid public funeral home, which advanced public money, 7,852,580.21 euros between them, to which we must add 1,351,386.29 that we look Tax authorities. Anticorruption urges to confiscate the goods that for now are seized until reaching 4.6 million in the case of Luceño and 912,700 euros in Medina’s.
Naty Abascal’s son bought a ship with the profits. Luceño opted for cars and luxury watches. Everything to make disappear, according to the accusations, the ball trail. In one of the emails incorporated into the cause, Luceño reports the first commission collection. In the body of the message he wrote: “Pa draws.”
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