The European Prosecutor’s Office tracks the more than three million useless and stored masks in the public hospitals of the Canary Islands. The investigators ordered a group from the Central Operational Unit (UCO) of the Civil Guard to inspect the warehouses of the Ministry of Health of the Government of the Canary Islands and the University Hospital (HUC) in search of defective medical material acquired during the COVID-19 pandemic. covid-19, after requiring the files and digital communications of 15 officials. The police intervention of the UCO has been extended throughout the week and is part of an investigation under summary secrecy aimed at determining whether the Canarian Health Service incurred crimes of misappropriation of public funds or administrative prevarication in its management of the health contracts processed. . by emergency route between 2020 and 2021.
The agents have also questioned SCS personnel as witnesses. One of those summoned to testify has been the one who was director of the service during the government of Ángel Víctor Torres, Conrado Domínguez. The European Public Prosecutor’s Office does not lose sight of the Canarian ramifications of the Koldo case in its investigations.
A report from the Audit of Accounts that includes the alleged irregularities in the awards detailed that most of the defective items are concentrated in Tenerife public hospitals. he La Candelaria HospitalIn Tenerife, it is the most affected with two million useless face masks, followed by the Hospital Universitario de Canarias (HUC) with 372,230 units, the Materno Infantil de Gran Canaria with 212,000, the doctor negrín (191,200), the Insular Hospital of Lanzarote (145,611), that of La Palma (109,680) and that of Fuerteventura (4,180).
Review in warehouses
The Minister of Health, Esther Monzon, stated yesterday that the Ministry has “provided all the information” about the adjudications that the European Public Prosecutor’s Office has required. The Civil Guard agents who appeared this Tuesday at the regional offices “requested a visual inspection of the warehouses to see if there was material from that time.”
Monzón confirmed that, in these investigation proceedings, the European Prosecutor’s Office “requested information about some files” and documents in which “all the people who could have been part” of the awards have been involved. “There is confidentiality of summary, so I understand that we must have the greatest respect and we, as the Ministry, are simply facilitators of all the information that has been requested of us,” he added.
The counselor did not want to go into more details about the judicial proceedings in response to questions from the media during an institutional event to present the Protocol for health action and inter-institutional coordination to address situations of violence in children and adolescents in the Canary Islands.
The agents take a statement from former director Conrado Domínguez as a witness
In addition to the files, The investigators seized the emails, queries and digital communications of 15 officials of the Government of the Canary Islands. The actions of the agents this Tuesday began in the offices of the Ministry of Health, continued in the General Directorate of New Technologies, which depends on the Presidency, and lasted about six hours.
The virtual environment of public employees was blocked and users’ personal codes were intercepted, all in order to safeguard interactions related to the awards and prevent manipulation of evidence. The next step will be for agents to make a complete copy of digital records.
investigation van beyond the Koldo business networkinvestigated by the National Court, and the mask case, which was instructed by the European Prosecutor’s Office as European funds were involved in the purchase of a million masks that never arrived.
24 suspicious contracts
The initial complaint sent to the Las Palmas Anti-Corruption Prosecutor’s Office details SCS awards to RR7 United (the company involved in the masks case), to Management and Support Solutions for Businesses (linked to the advisor of former minister José Luis Ávalos) and 15 other companies. . In total, the document refers to 24 suspicious contracts and compare the price at which the materials were purchased with the usual cost in the market. In total, the Prosecutor’s Office is investigating 31.9 million euros spent by the SCS.
The head of the Investigative Court number 7 of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria, Francisco García García-Sotoca, initially investigated the case before recusing himself in favor of the European Prosecutor’s Office. The tax instructors, Oihana Azcue Labayen and Gloria Yoshiko Kondo Pérez, They focused first on the case of RR7about which the secrecy of the proceedings was recently lifted.
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