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 real treasure hunters behind a mask.”
Andrés Rueda, director of a nursing home, used these words to describe the chaos of the first months of the pandemic crisis. Rueda testified on September 28, 2020 in an investigation committee at the Parliament of Catalonia.
His testimony was one of the most frightening of those heard in those sessions. People fell ill and died in just four days, workers fell ill. There was no media, but there was a lot of paperwork and a lot of official and contradictory instructions.
There is something impudent in the commissions of inquiry that this week will begin work in Congress and the Senate on the schemes for the sale of masks in the midst of a pandemic: the forgetting of the victims who are still litigating in court today to know what went wrong to pass. It is only necessary to review the lists of the more than two hundred witnesses who have already been called to testify.
Was there speculation? Of couse
Do we really need to set up two commissions, one in Congress and another 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 so. As many as Mr. Alberto González Amador and his friends.
They, and not only them, took advantage of the opportunity: they sold it to most of the administrations that were urgently acquiring medical equipment in those months, to the highest bidder (or impostor) and at whatever price, because people were dying. It’s a different matter to know what those second-hand sellers did with the money they earned. That’s what the courts and the Treasury are for.
Does it take a big investigation to find out if there was speculation? No. Or maybe no one remembers that, after a very long political and media discussion, in November 2020 the Central Government had to intervene in the sale price of masks to the public?
What actually causes more surprise is the surprise that now seems to be distressing the deputies and senators. His astonishment recalls that scene in the Casablanca casino in which Captain Renault exclaims: “What a scandal! I discovered that there is a game here!”.
To understand what happened, you only need to listen to employers in the health sector who, already in the middle of the pandemic, lamented that they had stopped making masks in Spain because they could not compete with the prices of China or Vietnam. No government understood that resignation that created a strategic problem that we would pay dearly for.
And that’s how, once the pandemic started, the rush to buy began. Those rushes that turned, for example, a soft drinks company based in a villa in Sant Cugat and with good contacts in China into one of the most important suppliers of masks to the Ministry of Health.
Exceptional billions
And so, too, billions were spent. How many? The database of the Independent Office for Regulation and Supervision of Spanish Contracting has registered for the year 2020 and 2021, 14,311 emergency contracts, that is, contracts to which the previous inspection controls were not applied usual because they were urgent, very urgent.
The office estimates that 7,000 million were thus spent in two years. But that figure doesn’t match other counts. The Central Administration alone transferred 20,000 million euros to the autonomous communities – all of which have exclusive powers in healthcare and have the ability to purchase through the emergency route.
How was that money spent? It is enough to read the reports of almost all the inspection bodies that exist in Spain – of the central, regional and local Government – to see that there were plenty of anomalies. No administration was spared the reproach. Are they all cases of corruption? Surely the vast majority do not. The question is why we had and still have such sloppy administrations.
There is an illuminating fact: one of the most recurring and expensive emergency expenses of all public institutions in the midst of a pandemic was not medical equipment. It was the IT equipment with which all governments – central, regional or local – tried to operate their offices closed to the public. We weren’t ready. And so we ended.
Koldo
The crisis, moreover, described a serious problem of professionalization of the management of public administrations and the case of Koldo García is exemplary. The PSOE organizing secretary’s chauffeur turned into a public command 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, councillors, all have the legal power to surround themselves with militants. People whose honesty should not be doubted a priori, but who owe it first to their boss and then to the public service.
Imagine for a moment that this advisor (chauffeur) to the minister had been a career civil servant. Would he have acted the same? We don’t know, but one might think not. At least, with regard to certain complicities that are now under suspicion.
So if the deputies and senators 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 what is still being done wrong now.
And don’t forget the victims.
