“Following Carlos's instructions...”

"Following Carlos's instructions, I send you some products that we have available and ready to send." These were the first words that Luis Medina, businessman and commission agents accused in the case maskssent by email to the Madrid City Council in March 2020. The "Carlos" he is talking about is Carlos Martínez-Almeida, cousin of the mayor of the city, and the email he addressed was that of the general coordinator of the mayor's office , where the offers came to sell sanitary material.

Almeida's cousin denied before the judge that he had spoken with the mayor: "He would be in more complex issues"

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These first emails, whose content has been revealed by the newspaper The reason and OkDiario and to which elDiario.es has had access, illuminate the first contact between the businessmen and the Madrid local administration after going through the mayor's cousin. Luis Medina asked his former teacher, María Díaz de la Cebosa, for a contact at City Hall and she sent him the mayor's cousin's phone number. This, in turn, consulted the general coordinator of the mayor's office, Matilde García, for the email to which they could be directed and transferred that information to the aristocrat, who wrote the first email from him on March 18.

The outcome of this succession of contacts close to the mayor of Madrid was the email sent by Luis Medina to [email protected]: "Following Carlos's instructions, I am sending you some products that we have available and ready to send by plane to the Barajas cargo terminal. ”, says that first email. Then he specifies things like "we are selling to the German and Belgian governments here in Europe" and invites them to buy not only masks but also "the disinfectant" which, according to him, comes from the United States.

It remains to be seen if any of these statements are part of the deception that the judge in the mask case is investigating. The complaint from the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office explains that the scam is not limited only to the prices that concealed millionaire commissions: also that Medina and Luceño presented themselves as experts in the Asian textile market when "they neither had significant experience in import business nor did they have factories in China". The transcripts of the statements of both businessmen do not reflect any allusion to the fact that at that time they were selling medical supplies to European countries and that they had factories at their disposal not only in China but also in the United States.

That first email from Luis Medina to Matilde García, whom he refers to as "Maite" in that communication, took a while to get a response. Also a second email in which the employer sent the available products. It was then that he contacted Carlos Martínez-Almeida again and he was once again interested in Matilde García about the communications. Everything was finally referred to Elena Collado, budget coordinator, and a constant exchange of communications began with Alberto Luceño that lasted until November 2020, shortly before the opening of proceedings by Anticorruption.

The documentation reveals the path of Medina's first email to Elena Collado's mailbox. On March 19, it was an advisor from the general coordination who bounced the email to the Emergency Department with the message: “I am passing you this proposal for the sale of medical supplies from Luis Medina Abascal.” From Emergencies, the email was finally sent to Elena Collado with a phrase: "Another provider."

A second chain of mail sent Medina's offer to Elena Collado. "These are suppliers of medical supplies and clothing manufacturers who offer to manufacture masks," says this new email from another adviser to the general coordination of the Madrid mayor's office.

The council, which exercises the accusation in this case, has also sent a report to the council in which it explains how the email address provided by the mayor's cousin to Luis Medina was the one to which all these offers were sent. The address, he says in the first place, "was and continues to be accessible to citizens on the website of the City Council itself." He also adds that "it was also published on the official Twitter account of the Madrid City Council."

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The investigation of the mask case, revealed by elDiario.es, has several directions: the deception of the commission agents to the Madrid City Council to inflate the price of the material and charge several million euros more, the subsequent management of that fortune when the money arrived from Malaysia to their bank accounts, but also if there was some kind of criminal favor treatment to the two businessmen to reach the person who managed these purchases in the worst of the first wave of the pandemic. In this sense, for now the judge has made it clear in several cases that Elena Collado, who centralized the deal with the commission agents, was as deceived by them as the council itself.