The person responsible for purchasing the City Council denies the judge that she knew that Medina and Luceño were commission agents

Elena Collado has testified for several hours before the judge of the case masks and, as elDiario.es has learned, he has denied that he knew that the businessmen Alberto Luceño and Luis Medina were going to collect a commission. The budget coordinator of the Madrid City Council, who has testified before the judge, has also defended that she was in charge of those contracts to buy sanitary material because she did it in most of the processes that were managed through the municipal funeral home and not because Nobody asked for it for that specific contract.

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He has also explained that he obtained the telephone number of Luis Medina Abascal, one of the commission agents, from one of the emails that he himself sent to the address of the general coordinator of the mayor's office, Matilde García, after reaching her through the cousin of the alderman. In his statement before the Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office in mid-2021, Collado did not know how to specify how he had gotten to Medina's phone.

Elena Collado is the general coordinator of budgets and she was the one who maintained constant contact via WhatsApp with the commission agents, especially with Alberto Luceño, after they arrived at the Madrid City Council at the indication of the mayor's cousin, Carlos Martínez-Almeida. She maintained this communication between March and November 2020, closing details on the deliveries and payments of the material and until a few days before the opening of proceedings by Anticorruption.

Already in his statement to the prosecutor of the case before its prosecution, Elena Collado stated that neither Luis Medina nor Alberto Luceño explained to her that they were going to charge commissions of such caliber that they were going to double or triple the original price of the product. She also recounted how she claimed part of the money back when she found that the gloves she had brought from China were not of the quality and characteristics that the council had required.

Throughout the case, several popular accusations have asked the judge in the mask case for Collado to testify as a defendant and not as a witness, but the magistrate has rejected that measure. In one of his records, for example, he reasoned that Collado had been as deceived as the City Council itself by the commissioners.

Speaking to the media at the entrance to the Madrid courts, the socialist councilor Mar Espinar accused the mayor, José Luis Martínez-Almeida, of being "incapable" of managing the public resources of the council. Regarding Collado's witness statement, the socialist councilor understands that she must clarify “why this contract, out of the thousand that came to the City Council. I do not believe that it is a general director who makes the final decision on a contract that took a bite that no other has taken ”.

In a similar sense, Alejandra Jacinto, a deputy for Podemos in the Madrid Assembly, has spoken. “This morning we learned of the imputation by the Supreme Court precisely for five allegedly irregular contracts. This is a pattern that repeats itself across the state,” she has said.