Munich – Bavaria’s Minister of Economic Affairs, Hubert Aiwanger (Free Voters) proudly presented a new corona test two days before New Year’s Eve 2020 in the “Ludwig-Erhard-Saal” of his ministry. With state funding of eight million euros, the Martinsried biotech cluster near Munich had developed a process that was supposed to be neither expensive nor tedious nor inaccurate. The test procedure called “GNA Octea” is fast, reliable and inexpensive, assured the head of the biotech company “GNA Biosolutions”, Federico Bürsgens.
Mask affair: Sauter made more profit than assumed from the corona pandemic
Aiwanger, whose house had funded the development of the rapid test from tax revenues, said at the presentation in his ministry that the Bavarian biotech industry had “landed a very large fish”. “There has never been anything like this before,” emphasized the biochemist and spokesman for the Bavarian Biotechnology Cluster, Horst Domdey. If you follow reports in the “Süddeutsche Zeitung”, someone else had landed a “big fish” for himself.
Namely Alfred Sauter from the Swabian town of Günzburg, who is now well-known throughout Germany. Under the pressure of criminal investigations into suspicion of bribery and corruption of mask business with ministries, Sauter recently gave up his party offices and “resigned” the CSU parliamentary group in the Bavarian state parliament, to which he had been a member for 31 years. As a lawyer, Sauter is said to have initiated the deals and received more than 1.2 million euros. The Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office has meanwhile secured part of the money that had been donated to Sauter’s local party friend Georg Nüßlein when the mask affair became known.
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Sauter is said to have received 300,000 euros – for an email
According to the “Süddeutscher Zeitung”, that should not have been all of the profit that Sauter is said to have drawn from the corona pandemic. Sauter is said to have sent the government-funded rapid test developer “GNA Biosolutions” an invoice of EUR 300,000 for his efforts, which is also said to have been paid. Reason for calling on the lawyer: There was a problem with the approval of “GNA Octea” by the Federal Institute for Drugs and Medical Devices (BfArM).
After everything that has been reported so far, Sauter has not overexerted himself for the generous fee. All that is reported is an email that the busy lawyer wrote to Prime Minister Markus Söder’s office manager (CSU). In it he called for a lot of steam to get approved for the innovative rapid test. The State Chancellery said that “nothing” had been initiated in response to Sauter’s email. The special approval came from the BfArM one day before Christmas, which gave Economics Minister Aiwanger the opportunity to quickly convene a successful press conference between the years.
Innovative corona rapid tests according to Aiwanger “Bavarian quality product”
Almost 97 percent of corona infected patients are identified by the test, according to the manufacturer. The probability that healthy people are wrongly recognized as infected is zero. “GNA Octea” thus achieves the high level of normal PCR tests (Polymerase Chain Reaction). In contrast to the previous PCR tests, in which the result is only determined after days, the “Bavarian Corona Rapid Test” (Aiwanger) only takes about 40 minutes from the throat swab to the test result. “Nobody can imitate us so quickly,” said Aiwanger happily at the end of last year: “It is a top-class Bavarian quality product.”
The state funding of eight million euros, which has flowed into the spin-off of Munich’s Ludwig Maximilians University since April, “we’ll see you again”, Aiwanger was certain, at the latest “when things are up and running”. Aiwanger hoped for similar coups from the Bavarian “therapy strategy” backed with 50 million euros in funding. This is intended to accelerate the development of procedures and drugs for the treatment of Covid 19 sufferers. In this regard, too, there are “very promising candidates,” said Aiwanger. In the CSU in particular, one hopes that the name Sauter will not appear again.
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