“We dressed in raincoats bought from the Chinese, from what we had been able to buy on Amazon, from the pharmacies that supplied us. We were true treasure hunters behind a mask.”
Andrés Rueda, director of a nursing home, described with these words the chaos of the first months of the pandemic crisis. Rueda testified on September 28, 2020 in a commission of inquiry in the Parliament of Catalonia.
His testimony was one of the most heartbreaking of those heard in those sessions. People were infected and died in just four days, workers became ill. There were no means but there was a lot of paperwork and many instructions that were as official as they were contradictory.
There is something impudent in the investigative commissions that this week will begin to work in Congress and the Senate on the plots to sell masks in the middle of the pandemic: the forgetfulness of the victims who are still litigating in court to find out what happened. It is only necessary to review the lists of the more than two hundred appearing parties who have already been called to testify.
Is it really necessary to establish two commissions, one in Congress and the other in the Senate, to find out if Mr. Koldo García Izaguirre and his partners made a lot of money selling masks? It is obvious that it was like that. Like Mr. Alberto González Amador and his friends.
They, and not only them, took advantage of the opportunity: they sold most of the administrations that in those months were acquiring medical supplies in a hurry, to the highest bidder (or imposter) and at whatever price because people were dying. Another thing is knowing what those second-hand sellers did with the money they earned. That’s what the courts and the Treasury are for.
Is a big investigation necessary to find out if there was speculation? No. Or does no one remember that, after a very long political and media discussion, in November 2020 the central government had to intervene in the public sale price of masks?
What actually causes more surprise is the surprise that now seems to overwhelm your honorable Members. His stupor recalls that scene in the Casablanca casino in which Captain Renault exclaims! What a scandal. I discovered that it is played here!
To understand what happened, you only need to listen to businessmen in the health sector who, already in the midst of the pandemic, lamented that in Spain they had stopped manufacturing masks because they could not compete with the prices of China or Vietnam. No government understood that resignation created a strategic problem for which we would pay dearly.
And that’s how, once the pandemic broke out, the rush to buy began. Those rushes that turned, for example, a soft drink company based in a chalet in Sant Cugat and with good contacts in China into one of the largest suppliers of masks to the Ministry of Health.
And so, too, billions were spent. How many? The database of the Independent Office for Regulation and Supervision of Contracting has registered for the year 2020 and 2021, 14,311 emergency contracts, that is, contracts to which the usual prior inspection controls were not applied because they were urgent, very urgent.
The office estimates that 7 billion were spent in two years. But that figure doesn’t fit with other counts. The central Administration alone transferred 20,000 million euros to the autonomous communities – all of them with exclusive powers in Health and with purchasing capacity through emergency means.
How was that money spent? It is enough to read the reports of almost all the inspection organizations in Spain – the central, regional and local governments – to verify that the anomalies were many. No administration was saved from reproach. Are they all cases of corruption? Surely the vast majority do not. The question is why we had and have such clumsy administrations.
There is an illuminating fact: one of the most recurring and expensive emergency expenses of all public institutions in the middle of the pandemic was not medical supplies. It was the computer equipment with which all governments – central, regional or local – tried to make their offices closed to the public function. We were not prepared. And that’s how it went for us.
The crisis also described a serious problem of professionalization of the management of public administrations and the case of Koldo García is exemplary. The driver of the PSOE organization secretary turned into a public commander with access to the last corner of a ministry! What a scandal!
But that shouldn’t surprise us either. Spain is the country in Europe where every time the Government changes, more public officials are dismissed and appointed. Presidents, ministers, advisors, all have the legal power to surround themselves with militants. People, whose honesty should not be questioned a priori, but who owe themselves first to their boss and then to public service.
Imagine for a moment that the minister’s advisor had been a career public servant. Would he have acted the same? We don’t know, but we think not. At least with respect to certain complicities that are now under suspicion.
So if your honors are going to investigate, it would be appropriate to focus not (or not only) on what they did in the pandemic, but on what they had not done before and on what they continue to do wrong now.
And don’t forget the victims.