In 2020, the Xunta de Galicia paid surcharges of up to 37% for the purchase of medical supplies from Mape Asesores, the Galician company that provided a commission of 2 million euros that year to Alberto González Amador, Isabel Díaz Ayuso’s partner, for intermediating in the sale and purchase of this type of material during the worst of the pandemic.
This surcharge is included in a report published in 2023 by the Consello de Contas, the Galician equivalent of the Court of Accounts, on the emergency contracts carried out by the Galician Health Service (Sergas) during the State of Alarm. The organization analyzed, among other aspects, the average price of the 2,567 million waterproof PPE gowns that the Xunta acquired between March and December 2020 for a total of 4.7 million euros.
53.3% of that amount, 2.517 million, went to Mape, which supplied the Xunta with one million waterproof PB86 EPI gowns. Fernando Camino, Alberto González Amador’s boss at the Quirón health group, the main payer of the Madrid president’s partner, has been a director of this company since 2019. Mape supplied 38.9% of the PPE that the Galician Health Service acquired that year.
The average price charged to the Xunta, according to the report, was 2.52 euros, one of the highest of the eight suppliers analyzed and 37% higher than the average of purchases in those months by Sergas, which was 1.84 euros per unit.
The report from the auditing body concludes that more than 86% of the payments and 92% of the gowns purchased “are concentrated in two suppliers, producing very unequal average prices per unit”: if Mape charged those 2.52 euros, on average, The second supplier, Hortas Suministros SL (which supplied almost 53% of the gowns) did so at a much lower price, 1,156 euros.
“This circumstance is explained by the fact that the main supplier in terms of amount”, Mape Asesores, “monopolized the purchases in the April-July period, while the second, with a greater quantity of product supplied, becomes the majority supplier to starting in August, when unit prices had already decreased considerably,” the report indicates.
In that year, with the entire world in a frantic race to buy gloves, masks or PPE to try to stop the spread of the coronavirus, purchases of this type of gowns by Sergas skyrocketed by 1,383% due to the health emergency, according to This organization stated in its allegations.
Mape also supplied the Xunta with 8.8 million masks between March and December 2020 for an amount of 4.5 million. In this case, it was also the first supplier, with 18.9% of the total units supplied that year to Sergas and 19.2% of the amount allocated by the Xunta through emergency contracts. The average price per unit that Mape charged was 0.51 euros, only slightly above the average analyzed among the 21 suppliers that Sergas had that year. Of the top ten mask suppliers in that financial year, Mape offered the sixth highest price. The most expensive ones were sold at 78 cents per unit.
The report highlights that “the average purchase price of Sergas was higher than the state average”, which amounted to 0.43 euros, according to an analysis of 150 files in which the central Administration acquired 757 million units for 328 million euros. However, in comparison with thirteen other autonomous communities analyzed, “it is among the four best,” according to the Galician Chamber of Accounts.
Mape concentrated 18.9% of the masks that Sergas acquired in 2020. It was the largest supplier of this type of materials and concentrated 19.2% of the 23.4 million euros that the Galician Health service allocated to purchase masks in 2020.
In 2020, Mape’s total turnover practically quadrupled, to a record of 113.2 million. In the year of the outbreak of the pandemic, this company was the largest supplier to Sergas through emergency contracts, with a total of 10,004,510 euros awarded in 2020, as advanced Infobookbased on a report from the Galician Chamber of Accounts published this year that, in general, warned of “deficiencies in some of the supporting reports, lack of a minimum of attendance and verification of the aptitude and capacity of the successful bidder” in these emergency contracts or “lack of publicity for part of the awards”, among other “incidents” related to these emergency contracts.
That report was based on the exhaustive analysis published in 2023, in which the Accounts Chamber pointed out “poor planning of purchases, or the fragmentation of orders so as not to exceed the limits established in the regulations for the minor contract.” A sample that “perfectly” illustrated this practice was how “up to 15 orders for the same item are placed on the same date, with the consequent unnecessary workload.”
Alberto González’s months of fortune
The material that Mape provided to the Xunta was delivered on the dates in which Alberto González Amador agreed on a 4.5% commission for which he pocketed two million euros, in exchange for mediating the purchase and sale of medical supplies from China that supplied a Catalan company (FCS) to Mape Asesores, the company of which its boss in Quirón, Fernando Camino, was already a director.
González Amador agreed with FCS to pocket that percentage for “the marketing of health products and/or personal protective equipment, such as gloves or masks, necessary to protect workers from exposure to the risk of contracting the coronavirus disease,” according to the contract that the businessman provided to the Tax Agency that has led to his accusation of tax fraud and document falsification.
As stated in the Treasury report that gave rise to the complaint, González Amador received these payments under the concept “customer marketing.” The commission agent and confessed fraudster explained to the Tax Agency that it was a commission to obtain buyers of medical supplies from the firm FCS Select Products SL, with whom, always according to González Amador’s story, he had signed an intermediation contract in January 2020, many weeks before the first positive for coronavirus was detected in Spain.
The Treasury Inspection described Maxwell Cremona, the company owned by the Díaz Ayuso couple that received the commissions, and that multiplied its turnover by six that year, as “a mere intermediary that will limit itself to putting the two parties in contact. to formalize the purchase and sale of the products.” The Treasury highlighted in its report that González Amador’s company “in no case will appear either as a buyer or as a seller or as part of the agreement.”
At that time, the buyer of those masks, Mape Asesores, already had Fernando Camino, director of Quirón and a key person in understanding González Amador’s enrichment that began in 2020, when his confessed fraud to the Treasury began through a fraud scheme. False invoices and shell companies that a Madrid Court is already investigating.
Camino was one of the creators of the company in the tax haven of Panama that Alberto González Amador managed while defrauding the Treasury. And the Quirón manager was also one of the creators of the front company that Ayuso’s partner bought at the end of 2020 to channel part of his fraud to the Treasury. Camino is closely linked to León, where Alberto González Amador’s tax advisor, Javier Gómez Fidalgo, has his office. This economist and lawyer manages the company that appears as the owner of the penthouse enjoyed by the president and her partner, on the upper floor of the apartment that González Amador put in her name in July 2022. The formal owner of that penthouse is a hotel businessman of Lion.
Who ended up paying the extra prices for the material that the commissions of Ayuso’s couple paid for is unknown. Mape has not explained to which clients he resold the orders for 42 million euros that he placed with FCS and that allowed Alberto González Amador to get the two million euros. In its clients section, the Galician firm cites administrations such as the Xunta, the Community of Madrid or the Ministry of Industry, public companies such as the Casa de la Moneda, and multinationals such as Inditex, Renault or Iberdrola, among others.
Years without publication
In the allegations to the report of the Galician Council of Accounts on emergency contracts during the pandemic, Sergas stated that Mape was among the “non-regular suppliers of the Galician Health Service” who were later selected by the central Administration. The Government of Spain established a framework agreement valued at more than 2,000 million that was put out to tender in August 2020 by the National Institute of Health Management (Ingesa).
One of the points that the supervisory body highlighted was the failure to comply with the duty to publicize these contracts. It took more than two years for them to appear on the Xunta de Galicia’s contracting platform. Today on the State contracting portal there are a dozen emergency contracts from Sergas to Mape for an amount of 9.77 million (not including VAT), awarded by hand between April 2 and June 10, 2020. Those almost ten million, some 4.34 million, correspond to contracts for the purchase of masks; another 4.19 million, to protective equipment, such as gowns; and 1.2 million, to other products such as antigen tests and protective glasses.
These contracts were not made public on the usual platforms in Spain until October 11, 2022. They were not published in the Official Journal of the EU until February 2023. This delay was a general trend in the Sergas emergency contracts, which It failed to comply with the legal obligation to publicize these awards, and this was highlighted by the Accounts Council in its report. The Galician Government argued in the allegations that “initially the files were published on the transparency portal, given that the computer systems were not prepared for the publication of emergency contracts.”
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