Ayuso and her brother's contracts

BarcelonaThe first wave of the pandemic caught the Spanish health system without reserves of strategic material such as respirators and masks, and everyone remembers the frantic race that the administrations started to obtain supplies from China. In this context, many of the contracts were made on an emergency basis, probably quite justifiably, but with the disadvantage of opening the door to possible irregularities. The Catalan Auditor itself found some of these irregularities in the contracts that the Catalan Department of Health signed, and for example it uncovered that €8m were paid by mistake to a respirator company, and is yet to be recovered.

Well, one of the people who made arrangements, and was paid for making them and import masks from China, was the brother of the Madrid regional president, Tomás Díaz Ayuso. Ayuso herself admitted this Friday that her brother was paid €55,850 + VAT by Priviet Sportive for intermediating with China to obtain 250,000 masks that this company sold to the Madrid regional government for €1.5m. This alone is already a cause for suspicion, because, as Pablo Casado said to the COPE Radio, either we are facing a crime of influence peddling or "not very exemplary" behaviour. Can anyone imagine that then Catalan President Torra's brother had acted as an intermediary to buy masks in China for the Generalitat and had pocketed a commission? What kind of political earthquake would it have meant?

Beyond the legality of the operation or lack thereof, which will have to be clarified by the courts, there is no doubt that Ayuso faces a political scandal of great dimensions. The step she took yesterday is not only insufficient, but opens many more questions. The public has the right to know not only the amount of this specific invoice, but also the amount of the rest of her brother's invoices with this company and the total amount of work he did and income he received related to the public administration. The opposition claims that Tomás Díaz Ayuso went around Madrid hospitals in the middle of the pandemic to offer his services, and it is very difficult to believe that he did not use his surname to influence decisions that could favour him.

Ayuso, then, is in trouble. But so is Pablo Casado, because the fact that the party had knowledge of these commissions and did not inform the Prosecutor's Office immediately is very suspicious. Everything points to the fact that Casado and Teodoro García Egea wanted to use this information to blackmail Ayuso so that she would no longer be a nuisance. The move, however, has gone horribly wrong, because now there is an alleged case of corruption and, moreover, a party that, instead of reporting it, tried to use it for its internal power struggles. No matter how it all ends, neither Ayuso nor Casado ought to come out unscathed. But then again, we are talking about a party involved in a plethora of corruption cases (Gürtel, Bárcenas, Kitchen) and in the dirty war against the independence movement.