Rapid tests of COVID-19 that the Puerto Rican government attempted to buy $ 38 million from an Australian company may have been part of a large fraudulent scheme in which there was no guarantee of product quality, according to international media reports, including The Guardian newspaper.
The British newspaper reported today, Monday, that the Australian company Promedical Equipment Pty Ltd is being investigated by the authorities of its country for falsely claiming that the serological tests it sells have been approved by the Therapeutic Products Administration (TGA), in Australia, and the Federal Food and Drug Administration (FDA) in the United States.
Both health product regulatory agencies removed Promedical from their lists of authorized providers. However, according to The Guardian, the Australian company has continued to market the test kits in Australia and abroad.
Promedical Equipment had an initial agreement with Chinese manufacturer Guangzhou Wondfo Biotech to acquire tests that were endorsed by the FDA and TGA. However, Promedical confirmed to The Guardian that it “did not proceed” with its agreement, and that it ordered a batch of unapproved evidence, from a supplier that refused to identify that it was delivered to its Brisbane warehouse on March 22.
On April 3, Jun Chen, general manager of Wondfo’s US branch, reported in written statements that Promedical “is not an authorized representative or distributor of Wondfo in Australia, the United States, or any other country or district.”
“Wondfo is not responsible for any complaints of products purchased from Promedical,” added Chen.
The Wonfo tests were what Apex said it was going to buy – through intermediaries in Canada and the United States – to sell for $ 38 to the government of Puerto Rico. The contract was signed in record time on March 26, with the promise that they would be on the island on March 31. Days after Apex missed the delivery date, the order was canceled and Apex returned the $ 19 million advance it had received to sell them.
The purchase from Apex through the Bureau of Emergency Management and Disaster Administration (Nmead) was endorsed, not only by the Department of Health, but also by Segundo Rodríguez Quilichini, coordinator of Governor Wanda Vázquez Garced’s medical advisory group, and by Juan Salgado, who has been one of the main spokesmen for the so-called “task force”. Both have referred to these tests as “the good ones.”
The transaction for the purchase of this product was stopped when Oriental Bank, due to security measures, froze the Apex account when the deposit of $ 19 million was reflected.
Promedical in principle said that it had not had contact with Apex, with his lawyer, Juan Maldonado, or with any other individual or company in Puerto Rico. Later it emerged that there were some contacts with Maldonado, but an even preliminary agreement was never reached for the sale of the evidence.
Today, Senator Ramón Luis Nieves, who is running for the November elections, asked the Justice Department to expand the investigation. that leads on this matter to include the possible “false representation” that he alleges were made to the government by Maldonado and businessman Aaron Vick, who appears to be signing the evidence purchase contract.
Vick said that although he sent his digital signature to Maldonado, with whom he had had business relationships, he did not authorize it to be used in the Apex contract. “We request an investigation into whether private businessmen committed fraud or any other crime against the government of Puerto Rico,” said Nieves, who believes that the investigation should not be limited to the officials who worked on this controversial transaction.
Internationally, the sale of the tests to Promedical also caused the United States Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) to suspend SCWorx Corp, following allegations that it made fraudulent claims about the rapid serological tests it would have available for the sale.
These COVID-19 tests, according to The Guardian, would be provided by Australia’s Promedical. The ability to distribute the evidence elevated SCWorx Corp’s shares, and now its shareholders are also investigating SCWorx CEO and President Marc Schessel for possibly making false claims about the provenance of that product.
“[La compañía] he had initial conversations with SCWorx in the United States and provided an invoice, but an order was never made, nor was payment made, “ Promedical’s spokesperson replied to The Guardian about this business relationship.
This reply from Promedical to the British newspaper is very similar to that given by the Australian company to the Puerto Rican journalist Valeria Collazo Cañizares and that The new day Collected last week about the failed transaction with Apex.
Meanwhile, the president of Promedical, Neran De Silva, was the subject of a previous investigation for allegedly defrauding clients and investors in the health company Cryo Australia. The company had to be liquidated and its main shareholders, among them the Australian government minister Stuart Robert, lost hundreds of thousands of dollars, as reported by The Guardian in its publication yesterday and in others published previously.
De Silva was also convicted, in 2018, of sexually assaulting a woman in Brisbane, Australia.
The desperate attempt to stop the spread of SARS-CoV-2 causing COVID-19 disease has made some regulations on the manufacture and distribution of health devices much less demanding.
In the United States, for example, the FDA relaxed requirements to allow the use of diagnostic tests, by issuing an Authorization for Urgent Use.
The flexibility of permits and the use of those who want to capitalize on this pandemic, with more than 2.9 million infected people in the world, has led to the execution of fraudulent or less judicious transactions by governments and entities around the planet.
One of the best known is the case of Spain, which bought 650,000 diagnostic tests that did not have the necessary level of reliability.
In Laredo, Texas, the FDA confiscated 20,000 tests purchased by a health center because, when they tried to validate them, they found that their results were unreliable and the tests were unusable.
Given the fraud schemes that were being reported, the FDA also had to issue a notice to alert that the federal agency has not yet authorized any rapid tests to be done at home.
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