The former Minister of Health Salvador Illa He defended this Wednesday that in the meeting he had with Koldo Garciathat It was “without an appointment” and lasted “a few minutes”, No agreement was reached. This was stated in his appearance before the Senate investigative committee to clarify his relationship with the main person involved in the mask purchase plot during the pandemic.
“He showed up, asked to see me, he didn’t know what he wanted, I saw what he wanted, I referred him to the technicians through my office and the matter was settled: The end result is that nothing was purchased.“, Illa detailed about the only meeting he had with Koldo García for “a few minutes” in September 2020.
Two days after appearing in Congress, Illa has given some more details in the Commission that investigates the contracts of the covid-19 pandemic in the Senate about the only meeting with the former advisor to the Ministry of Transport, then led by José Luis Ábalos.
The current leader of the Catalan socialists, who began his intervention by arguing that has not received any official notification about his summons this Wednesday in the Senatewhich he learned about through the media, clarified, in response to questions from the Joint Group senator Mar Caballero, that Koldo “appeared without an appointment” at the Ministry.
“Nothing was purchased”
“He asked to see me, I seem to remember that it was the month of September, he didn’t know what he wanted, the meeting was not scheduled; He told me that he had a company that could supply material and I referred him to the technicians through my cabinet”, he responded along the same lines that he said two days ago in Congress. A meeting that “lasted just a few minutes and you know the result: nothing was purchased.”
It was not “normal” for a Ministry advisor to “show up without an appointment”, and that was precisely why she agreed to see him. “I thought: ‘Well, what do you want?’, I received him, and when I saw that he was talking to me about this matter, I followed the procedure that we had established in this case.”
“He was an advisor to a minister with whom I usually dealt because I saw him at meetings of delegated authorities. He shows up, comes to see me, I see what it is about and I apply what was applied at all times. Spot. I didn’t give it any more thought, or more importance, nor did I see anything that caught my attention or led me to suspect anything,” he concluded.
Regarding the three meetings that his former chief of staff, Víctor Francos, admitted to having had with Koldo García – two at the beginning of the year and a third a day after leaving office, in January 2021 -, Illa has limited himself to saying that he has already He recounted the “circumstances” in which they occurred. “I refer to your explanations,” has added.
Which has flatly denied that two contracts were awarded to the key company in the plot, Management Solutions. “It did not invoice anything, it was not awarded, is that it is also uncertain that it was enabled in a framework agreement”, but that it was a temporary union of companies with Ferrovial Services, of which another 70 firms were part of two lots of material.
Illa has also ruled out having seen or sent messages with any other person in the plot. “I did not meet with any of these people, nor did I give any contract to any autonomous community, if I did not even give the ‘ok’ to those from the Ministry of Health, beyond the first days of the pandemic that I had to authorize,” he recalled.
Questioned about the defective masks sold to the Balearic Government, he defended that the Ministry always “took appropriate measures” about the material that did not meet the standards, and that is why it implemented a quality control system at origin and destination that worked “perfectly.”
