Exclusive
Status: May 21, 2021 6:00 p.m.
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The Munich public prosecutor is investigating whether Bavaria wasted taxpayers’ money buying FFP2 masks. Other federal states sometimes paid even higher unit prices, as researched by WDR, NDR and SZ shows.
By Markus Grill and Lena Kampf,
NDR / WDR
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In Munich, the public prosecutor’s office is investigating whether the state of Bavaria wasted tax money on buying FFP2 masks from the Swiss company Emix. The occasion was an advertisement by the Bavarian SPD boss Florian von Brunn.
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WDR, NDR and “Süddeutscher Zeitung” (SZ), the exact purchase prices from ten other federal states are now available for the first time. Some of them were even higher than in Bavaria. The state of North Rhine-Westphalia paid the highest known price for an FFP2 mask to date. On March 3, 2020, the Ministry of Health there ordered 527,000 FFP2 masks from Emix. The company was last known because it is said to have paid the daughter of CSU politician Gerold Tandler millions in commissions for arranging masks.
Andrea Tandler also brokered the Emix masks for North Rhine-Westphalia. The then Bavarian Minister of Health Melanie Huml (CSU) arranged the contact to North Rhine-Westphalia. While the Federal Ministry of Health had to pay an average of 5.58 euros for an Emix mask and the state of Bavaria 8.90 euros, Emix asked North Rhine-Westphalia 9.90 euros per mask.
It is astonishing that only five days earlier, NRW had bought more than 300,000 FFP2 masks from the manufacturer 3M for 1.15 euros each. In total, North Rhine-Westphalia bought more than 68 million FFP2 masks in 2020. Adding the orders together results in an average price of 4.34 euros per mask.
“Prices changed almost every hour”
In response to a small question from SPD MP Stefan Kämmerling, the NRW state government justifies the prices paid as “customary in the market”. “At that time, the prices for masks changed almost every hour.” In addition, “because of the global rush for protective equipment, promising short-term offers had to be used”.
Baden-Württemberg bought FFP2 masks for the cheapest of all federal states. The Swabians ordered 17 million masks and paid an average of just 2.85 euros per piece. The Chinese company Ryzur even asked the country to only charge 1.20 euros per mask. On request, Claudia Krüger, spokeswoman for the Ministry of Social Affairs, said: “We were able to procure Ryzur’s masks directly from the factory in China without an intermediary. Hence the (relatively) low net purchase price ex works After researching the market, we approached Ryzur about our shopping facility in China. ”
Extremely high price differences
Brandenburg (EUR 2.90) and Hamburg (EUR 2.98) also bought FFP2 masks at a reasonable price. In contrast, Thuringia (4.15 euros) and Bremen (4.29 euros) had to spend significantly more money on average per mask. Saxony-Anhalt has paid prices of up to 9.00 euros per FFP2 mask, but the state does not want to reveal how many masks were bought at this price for taxpayers’ money and to whom the money went: “We ask for your understanding that we For reasons of competition, we are unable to provide any further information about the delivery companies, “said the spokeswoman for Labor Minister Petra Grimm-Benne (SPD).
Rhineland-Palatinate refuses to provide information
Rhineland-Palatinate is the only federal state that has completely refused to provide information. The local minister of social affairs, Alexander Schweitzer (SPD), has the message: Since the masks “were primarily procured for employees of the public service and not for citizens”, the reference that the population (…) has an increased interest in the use of the Taxpayers got “.
In addition to Rhineland-Palatinate, Hesse, Saxony-Anhalt, Saxony and Schleswig-Holstein are characterized by secrecy and lack of transparency in the question of masks. All of them did not want to provide information, or only partially, about how much tax money they had paid to whom, exactly, to buy corona masks.
Spahn speaks of the “Wild West”
At the end of last week, Federal Minister of Health Jens Spahn also commented on the procurement of masks in the past year and the sometimes extremely high prices at the federal press conference. “It was the Wild West 14 months ago,” admitted Spahn. But when he now sees the profits that were made and the commissions that were pocketed, it has “a moral dimension that I find difficult to accept”.
Health Minister Spahn accuses companies of taking advantage of the emergency situation that prevailed in the health sector.
Image: AFP
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Back then, companies that had never had anything to do with masks in their life promised to procure them. There was a “gold rush atmosphere” in which “the emergency situation that the health service had” was exploited.
Spahn should know what he’s talking about: After all, his ministry has concluded one of the largest mask deals with the Emix company and transferred more than 600 million euros to the company of the two young Swiss entrepreneurs Luca Steffen and Jascha Rudolphi, who in turn honored Andrea Tandler.
North Rhine-Westphalia’s Health Minister Karl-Josef Laumann (CDU) recently responded to the question of whether he found it appropriate that Tandler may have earned more than 30 million euros in these trading transactions with a single word: “No”.
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