• Canary Islands The Canary Health Service, on the bench for the purchase of a million masks that never reached public hospitals

Judge

Francisco Javier García García-Sotoca , instructor of the so-called 'Masks case', has summoned the president of the

Canary Islands

,

Ángel Víctor Torres

, to testify as a witness

in the investigation of the

allegedly irregular purchase of a million

masks

. at the height of the

Covid

pandemic , reports Canarias 7.

The statement will be produced after the three investigated, two of them senior officials of

the Canary Health Service

, and the witnesses proposed by the Anti-

Corruption Prosecutor

's Office have done so .

The

Masks case

investigates the person in charge of

the Canary Health Service

(

SCS

), its former director of Economic Resources and the administrator of the winning company, a car buying and selling company that received, at the critical point of the coronavirus pandemic ,

four million public euros for the purchase of a million masks that never reached public hospitals in the Canary

Islands, reports Canarias 7.

Since last April 8, the Las Palmas de Gran Canaria delegation of the

Special Prosecutor's Office against Corruption and Organized Crime has

been investigating the emergency contracts of the Canarian Government for the acquisition of medical supplies in the midst of the Covid pandemic.

After detecting a possible criminal act, an investigation was launched that culminated in the

criminal complaint against the health officials of the Canary Islands

by the prosecutor Javier Ródenas.

The Canarias 7 investigation sheds light on a contract that it defines as

"the antithesis of what is expected from a million-dollar negotiation with a public administration"

.

The award was conceived in WhatsApp conversations between the commission agents and the director and director of Economic Resources of the SCS, so that there was not even contact between the awarding administration and the owner of the winning company.

In its complaint, the Prosecutor's Office considers that what motivated the lack of demand when assessing the award was "precisely, the bond of friendship between the intermediaries and the member of the Health Emergency Management Committee, Conrado Domínguez, and with the sole partner of "RR7", Rayco Rubén".

"Rayco did not need to cheat to get the contract. It was enough for him to be a friend. To be a friend of the close contact friend of Conrado Jesús," reads the indictment.

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