Madrid (EFE) of sanitary material in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic.
The prosecutor Luis Rodríguez Sol has already presented his brief in which he accuses Luceño of the crimes of aggravated fraud, false commercial and official documents and another aggravated against the Treasury.
The son of the Duke of Feria and Naty Abascal, Luis Medina, is considered a co-author of fraud and forgery in a commercial document for this operation for the sale of sanitary material in which, according to the investigation, more than 6 million dollars in commissions were pocketed.
In its letter, in addition to the prison sentence, Anti-Corruption requests a total fine of 5.6 million euros for Luceño, while for Medina it requests 450,000 euros.
Request compensation of almost 8 million euros for the City Council
It also demands that they jointly and severally compensate the Municipal Funeral Services Company of Madrid, which was the one that formalized the purchase, with a total of 7.8 million euros, an amount corresponding to the commissions they earned and the premium paid by the City Council. , among other concepts.
In the case of Luceño, the Prosecutor’s Office also wants him to pay 1.3 million euros to the Treasury if the court considers that he should have paid taxes for the commissions he obtained.
The Madrid City Council, an accusation in the proceedings, requests in its writing that Luceño be sentenced to 11 years in prison and a fine of 600,000 euros, while for Medina he requests 9 years and 450,000 euros, as well as that both jointly compensate to the Funeral Services Company with 7.9 million euros.
The indictment accuses Luceño of continued crime of aggravated fraud, false commercial and official documents, and Medina of the first two.
The “intention” of both to “exaggerately enrich themselves”
The events date back to March 2020, “in a situation of rapid evolution of the pandemic” of COVID-19 and “of extreme need and lack of sanitary materials.” According to the prosecutor, Luceño took advantage of the fact that he knew a businessman in Malaysia who could supply these products and went to Medina “so that he, since he was a well-known person in Spanish social life, would seek and facilitate contact with possible public institutions.” .
Medina, through a mutual friend, “managed to contact a relative of the mayor of Madrid”, who provided him with a City Hall email address “to which he could direct his offer”.
The prosecutor underlines the “intention” of both to “exaggerately enrich themselves” at the expense of the situation of need by selling products at “a much higher price than what was offered by the suppliers”, as a result of the “imposition of some exorbitant commissions” that they hid from the Consistory, which they convinced “that they were acting for altruistic reasons”.
Some exorbitant commissions
The contracts were negotiated between Luceño and Elena Collado, general coordinator of Budgets and Human Resources of the City Council.
The first imposed some amounts on the Consistory and hid “that a high percentage” (60% in the case of masks, 81% in the case of gloves and almost 71% in the case of tests) “corresponded to commissions” for him and Medina.
There were three contracts signed by the City Council: one million masks for 6.6 million dollars; two and a half million pairs of gloves for 5 million dollars and 250,000 tests for 4.2 million.
After returning part of the gloves because they were not the ones agreed, the City Council paid 11.9 dollars of which, according to the prosecutor, Luceño pocketed a commission of 5.1 million dollars and Medina one, despite the fact that the first He promised the second that they would charge the same.
More than six euros were paid per mask
The prosecutor recounts how they inflated prices on items that sometimes were not of the required quality. In the case of the masks, he points out, they took 4,000,000 dollars as a net profit from the operation, “148% of the real price of the product.”
“In addition, the price paid by the Madrid City Council in this operation (6.24 euros per unit) was, by far, the highest that a Spanish city council of more than 300,000 inhabitants paid for this type of product,” he adds.
He also accuses them of falsifying documents, including some with the signature of the Malaysian businessman San Chin Choon, to achieve their objective, and also affirms that Luceño avoided declaring his real earnings to the Treasury.
Watches, luxury cars and a house are some of the assets that Luceño bought with the money obtained, while Medina spent it on a sailboat called “Feria” and on bonds, in his case all seized in court, which also has the rights that correspond to the aristocrat by the millionaire inheritance of his deceased grandmother, Victoria Eugenia Fernández de Córdoba y Fernández de Henestrosa.
The entry Mask Case: The Prosecutor’s Office requests a sentence of 15 years in prison for Alberto Luceño and 9 for Luis Medina was first published in EFE Noticias.