The manager of Madrid Salud, Antonio Prieto, assured this Friday before the judge in the mask case that the number of defective Covid tests acquired by the City Council through the commission agents Luis Medina and Alberto Luceño amounts to 175,000 and not 60,000 as they defend. the Consistory and the mayor himself, José Luis Martínez-Almeida.
Prieto, a family doctor specializing in public health, has rejected that the solution to the defective batch of 115,000 tests was the shipment of some reagents by the Malaysian manufacturing company because that could not improve its reliability, as Martínez has defended- Almeida since he admitted that he knew about the mask case.
Antonio Prieto has thus ratified the content of the mail that works in the case and that he himself addressed to the City Council’s purchasing manager, Elena Collado, and to the Security delegate and spokesperson for the Martínez-Almeida Consistory, Inmaculada Sanz. In that email, dated May 26, 2020, the head of the Madrid Salud organization states that only one of the three batches received, that of the 75,000 tests, “is the one with the highest sensitivity and specificity according to data from the INIA laboratory” . “It is the one we are using in Police, Fire, Samur, Funeral Services and EM. The other batches should not be used due to their low sensitivity”.
However, Prieto has ensured that a batch of 60,000 tests was returned and not the one of 115,000, with a reliability that was not sufficient, according to the specialist. The City Council defends that the commission agents, after complaints from the Consistory, sent some reagents that allowed those 115,000 tests to be used.
“From my experience I knew that the problem with the tests was not the diluent. When they tell me they have a low sensitivity, below 80%, I don’t use it. And when they told me that they were going to send me the bafer and they send it to me, I had other better products, so I didn’t use it”, Prieto has affirmed, according to what legal sources inform elDiario.es.
In addition, the manager of Madrid Salud has revealed a piece of information that puts the City Council and its thesis on reagents in a bind. Since elDiario.es revealed the existence of a secret anti-corruption investigation by the commissions in medical equipment on March 31, the Consistory has refused to offer data on the final destination of the products acquired through Medina and Luceño, the largest purchase of PPE material by the Government of the capital in the entire pandemic. Prieto has revealed today that a total of 125,000 tests are still stored by the Consistory without being used.
The same situation occurs with the defective gloves sent by Medina and Luceño. Unusable to protect citizens, the City Council assured this medium that it distributed them to other Consistory personnel with less exposure to the virus than doctors, as in the case of EMT drivers. According to Prieto, this is false and the gloves had no destination.
After Collado’s complaints, Luceño agreed to a discount on the gloves, but not to return them. Finally, the City Council was left with wrist-length gloves for 2.5 million euros which, as the manager of Madrid Salud declared today, had no use.
To the six million euros that Alberto Luceño and Luis Medina stayed in commissions, we must add the damage caused by the fact that part of the material that the consistory acquired was “defective” or “of poor quality”, according to the expressions used in their Complain the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor. This material had a destination yet to be clarified and involved a disbursement of 4 million euros. The administration led by José Luis Martínez-Almeida never denounced him.
“I don’t know where Collado gets that the masks were great”
On the other hand, Prieto has also shown the mistrust that the masks that the City Council bought from the commission agents for 6.6 million dollars and the question of why Elena Collado, the high official of the City Council, bragged about their quality, the manager of Madrid Salud has said: “I don’t know where Collado got that they were very good”.
The Anti-Corruption complaint reflects “a large part of the Covid-19 tests that the City Council received were defective.” “Specifically, of the 250,000 tests received, only 75,000 had an acceptable level of sensitivity,” adds Luis Rodríguez Sol. According to the prosecutor’s statements, the City Council paid 3.06 million euros for diagnostic tests that did not have “an acceptable level of sensitivity.” of acceptable sensitivity. To this figure must be added the 926,002.84 euros in gloves “of very low quality and that only reached up to the wrist”. In total 3,989,008.4 euros of a medical material without official explanations of the use that was given to it.
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