Anti-corruption requests 15 years in prison for Alberto Luceño and 9 for Luis Medina for the mask case

The Anti-Corruption letter ensures that the 6.24 euros per unit that the City Council paid for each of the million masks purchased from commission agents “was, by far, the highest price that a Spanish city council of more than 300,000 inhabitants paid for this type of product. The same thing happened, says the Prosecutor’s Office, with the Covid tests (16.03 euros per unit), “by far, the highest paid by a Spanish council in any large city.

“The intention of both defendants was to exaggerately enrich themselves at the expense of the aforementioned situation of extreme need and lack of sanitary materials, selling the products for a price much higher than what was offered by the suppliers, and this as a consequence of the imposition of exorbitant commissions that were kept hidden from the buyer at all times, whom they convinced that they were acting for altruistic reasons, without obtaining any benefit from the operation, ”says the letter from prosecutor Luis Rodríguez Sol.

In its factual account, Anticorrupción briefly exposes how Luis Medina and Alberto Luceño came to offer the material to the Madrid City Council, in the hands of the Popular Party. According to the prosecutor, Luceño turned to Luis Medina, brother of the Duke of Feria and son of Naty Abascal, because he is “a well-known person in Spanish social life” and with the intention that he “seek and facilitate contact with possible interested institutions.” in the acquisition of that material. Anticorruption does not specify which other institutions were contacted and if, in any case, they were of another political sign.

“With the above information, and through a mutual friend, Luis Medina managed to contact a relative of the mayor of Madrid, who provided him with an address of the General Coordination of the Mayor’s Office of Madrid to which he could address his offer,” adds Anticorrupción .

The Anti-Corruption story continues with the contact between Luceño and Elena Collado, former Secretary of State for Finance in the Government of Rajoy and to whom the Madrid City Council commissioned the purchase of sanitary material for its workers. Luceño, says the Prosecutor’s Office, presents himself as an “expert in importing products from the Asian market, with factories in China at his disposal”, moved by an “altruistic spirit”. “In reality, neither he nor he had significant experience in import business, nor did he have factories in China, in the same way that he did not act motivated by any altruistic intention,” the prosecutor concludes.

The offer that Luceño makes of the products that in turn come from Malaysian Leno are 1 million KN95 masks (6,683,000 million dollars), 2.5 million pairs of nitrile gloves (5 million dollars) and 250,000 rapid tests (4,250,000 dollars). “These prices were imposed by Alberto Luceño on the Madrid City Council, saying that it was the price set by the exporter. In doing so, it concealed 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 tests) corresponded to commissions that the defendants were going to receive ”, collects the brief of conclusions. To emphasize the altruistic nature of their operation, says the Prosecutor’s Office, the commissioners gave 283,000 masks to the Consistory.

Deception among alleged scammers

The letter also includes how Luceño prepared a document to make Luis Medina believe that both would charge 1 million euros in commissions “although the first had agreed with Leno an additional commission of 2 dollars for masks.” Just for this type of material, Luceño obtained a total of 3 million euros in commissions. To obtain the 4 million euros of commissions only on masks, the commission agents inflated the price by 148%. The City Councils of Barelona and Zaragoza purchased the same masks at the same time for 2.5 euros and 1.6 euros, respectively, compared to the 6.24 disbursed by Madrid.

The writing of conclusions also recovers the episode of the nitrile gloves and how the City Council paid for useless ones, for only reaching the wrist and not protecting up to the elbow. The scam is based on the fact that the amount returned by the commissioners to the City Council coincides with the commission that they were going to take, 4 million dollars. All in all, the Consistory was left with some useless gloves for the toilets for about 900,000 euros that it distributed “among municipal employees who were not healthcare personnel, as was the case with the Municipal Transport Company”. “In summary, the Madrid City Council paid 952,212.20 euros for gloves that, bought in a supermarket, would have cost 416,666.66 euros, that is, they paid a premium of 535,545.54.”

The episode of the rapid tests of which only one of the three items received was used deserves a separate chapter in the writing: “Of the 250,000 tests received, only 75,000 had an acceptable level of sensitivity.” The person in charge of Madrid Salud did not believe Luceño’s argument that the problem was the diluent and that the commission agent would send new batches of it. By the time they landed in Madrid, the City Council had already bought and disbursed public money for other tests. Madrid paid 16.03 per unit while Barcelona paid, for example, 7.36 euros. All this reverts to the accusation of aggravated fraud, which involves a request for a sentence of 7 years in prison for each one.

All kinds of false documents

Regarding forgery, Anticorruption describes the string of false documents that Luceño and Medina presented to their respective banks to justify such large and immediate income, as well as a false invoice in the case of the former. That is why they are both accused of falsifying a commercial document, with a penalty of two years in prison. Luceño will have to face another request for two years in prison for falsifying an official document, including a CNI agent badge.

Finally, Anticorruption describes how Alberto Luceño created a company, Takamaka Investements SL, on May 26, 2020, to which he later invoiced the work. “If Alberto Luceño had included this income in his personal income tax return, with a progressive rate much higher than that of Corporate Tax, he would have had to pay a fee of 2,010,901.58 euros. However, by declaring them as company income, only 659,515.29 entered the public coffers (…) failing to pay 1,351,386.29 euros, “says the Prosecutor’s Office, who asks for him 4 years in prison for tax offenses .

In addition, the defendants, according to the Prosecutor’s Office, must compensate the Madrid public funeral home, which advanced the public money, 7,852,580.21 euros between them, to which must be added 1,351,386.29 that Luceño owes to the Treasury. Anti-corruption urges to seize the assets that are currently seized up to 4.6 million in the case of Luceño and 912,700 euros in the case of Medina.

––––––––

You know about this case thanks to elDiario.es

elDiario.es revealed the mask case in March 2022. We are financed thanks to the fees of 60,000 members who support us. Thanks to them, we can write investigations like this and that all readers – including those who cannot pay – have access to our information. But we ask you to think for a moment about our situation. Unlike other media, we do not shut down our journalism. And that makes it much more difficult for us than for other media to convince readers of the need to pay.

If you get information from elDiario.es and you believe that our journalism is important, and that it is worthwhile for it to exist and reach as many people as possible, support us. Because our work is necessary, and because elDiario.es needs it. Become a member, become a member, of elDiario.es.