The Anti-Corruption Prosecutor's Office has shelved the proceedings opened against the brother of the Madrid president for brokering a mask contract for 1.5 million euros in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic. In the decree, the chief prosecutor concludes that Isabel Díaz Ayuso did not participate in any way in the award of the contract and, therefore, she should be exempt from any investigation in this regard.
Several Madrid opposition parties denounced the "popular" leader for a possible crime of influence peddling. Prosecutor Alejandro Luzón concludes that according to various testimonies, none of the officials who participated in the award of the contract received any indication, call, recommendation or suggestion from an authority or official interested in hiring the Priviet company, for which Tomás Díaz Ayuso mediated.
"There is no direct or indirect intervention of the president of the Community of Madrid in this file, nor of the mediation on her behalf of Tomás Díaz Ayuso before any official or authority," the decree states. The prosecutor explains that during these months the documentation submitted by the complainants has been analyzed but the investigation "has not confirmed the aforementioned criminal hypothesis nor does it allow further progress in it."
Luzon therefore considers this matter settled and agrees to notify the European Public Prosecutor's Office with which he had a run-in precisely as a result of this matter. Although the State Attorney General's Office understood that Anticorruption should be competent to investigate these events, the European considered that European funds were at stake and insisted on continuing with its investigation, which is supervised by the National High Court, which will now keep its proceedings open . Regarding the president's brother, the file decree recalls that he had already been working in the health market since the last century. And for that reason, in March 2020, in the midst of a pandemic, he proposed to the owner Priviet, whom he knew, a business opportunity to sell masks.
For the prosecutor, the version of the president's brother on how to achieve the contract and on the price of the masks seems "coherent" and therefore considers that there are no indications to file a complaint against him. "His account of him is not overshadowed by the hypotheses raised by the complainants who have not exceeded the threshold of mere suspicions or conjectures that do not allow progress, even provisionally, in an incriminating thesis." After knowing her file, Díaz Ayuso has spoken of “unjustified hunting of the left against her.
The news was known after 1:30 p.m., minutes before Ayuso herself appeared at the weekly plenary session of the Madrid Assembly to report her minimal modification of her government team. And the regional president has not missed the opportunity to begin her intervention by referring to this file and the "unjustified hunt" that, in her opinion, the left has undertaken throughout this year.
"Ladies of the left, there are already 20 times, 20 counted, that they have taken me to court and 20 times that justice, judges and prosecutors have said that they are all falsehoods. They have used Parliament and the institutions to stain my honor 20 times, it will be that justice is of the extreme right, it will be that the system is corrupt, but there are 20 times where the tortious use that you are making of justice has been demonstrated.
Therefore, it files the investigation regarding the crimes of influence peddling, prevarication, prohibited negotiations with officials, fraud and falsehood, although it does not rule on possible crimes of embezzlement, fraud against the financial interests of the EU and bribery, "in scrupulous respect" of the powers of the European Public Prosecutor's Office, which keeps its investigations open.
