"She was deceived by the commission agents"

Elena Collado, a high-ranking Madrid City Council official who managed the purchase of medical supplies with Alberto Luceño and Luis Medina, will testify as a witness and not as a defendant. The judge of case masks He has rejected the request for several accusations and has agreed to keep him testify as a witness, as he already did in the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office in mid-2021. He will have to appear on the 27th of this month of May.

In the same car, the judge rejects cite Engracia Hidalgo as accused, Councilor for the Treasury, as several accusations had requested. The accusation that the agreement signed between the City Council and the municipal funeral home to buy sanitary material in a more agile way was systematically used to skip the hiring controls would imply, for the judge, calling all those who signed the agreement to testify. That, he says, would be "unreasonable and a prospective investigation," which is why he rejects that Hidalgo testify as a defendant.

For the judge, there is no reason to impute any crime to the City Council's budget coordinator, Elena Collado. "There is no evidence that he appropriated public money," says the judge, emphasizing that commission agents Luceño and Medina hid from him that they were going to collect commissions. The judge also says that "regardless of whether he was more or less diligent in his actions, there is no evidence that he had the power to contract with the Leno company."

She, says the judge, “was deceived by the commission agents” and at the most serious moment of the pandemic, “exhaustive checks on the sanitary material” that she bought cannot be required. In addition, she claimed Luceño as soon as she verified that the gloves were defective. “She hid the amount of her commissions that inflated the price of her contracts in an excessive way, and her true relationship with the Malaysian company Leno”, concludes the judge.

Elena Collado was the representative of the City Council who closed all the details of the purchase of masks, gloves and tests with Alberto Luceño and Luis Medina. From a first email exchanged with the aristocrat at the end of March, the person in charge of emergency purchases exchanged hundreds of WhatsApp messages with Luceño to organize the arrival of all the material, once the contracts with the municipal funeral home were signed.