Mask affair: investigations in the Ministry of Health | tagesschau.de

In the affair about ordering masks from the Swiss company Emix, the public prosecutor is now investigating information from NDR, WDR and SZ against a senior official in the Ministry of Health for breach of trust.

The official had extra insurance. On the evening of April 21, 2020, he wrote an email to Health Minister Jens Spahn: “Dear Minister, we have had very good experiences with the Emix company. I would like your approval to buy 100 million FFP2 masks.” At 8:52 p.m. Jens Spahn answered from his iPad with just one word: “Agreed”.

Spahn thus approved an order for 540 million euros. At that time, the Ministry of Health bought masks at a price of 5.40 euros from the Swiss dealer Emix. Three weeks earlier, the official had bought 32 million masks from Emix at a price of 5.95 euros each. These two orders alone should cost taxpayers around 790 million euros.

No investigations against Spahn

The Berlin public prosecutor’s office is now targeting these two deals when investigating the official, who has been one of the top executives in the Federal Ministry of Health for years and also holds a top position in the ministry under Minister Karl Lauterbach. The matter is not being investigated against Spahn himself.

For Emix, the pandemic has been big business. The previously rather small trading company is said to have made a total of 300 million euros in profit with its deliveries of corona protective equipment to German ministries, according to estimates by the Munich public prosecutor, who are also investigating the mask affair. Emix denies this. However, information from the company suggests at least a profit of up to 200 million euros.

Emix’s contact with the then Health Minister Spahn came about through the mediation of Monika Hohlmeier, the daughter of the former Bavarian Prime Minister Franz Josef Strauss (CSU). Hohlmeier, in turn, was asked by Andrea Tandler, owner of a PR agency and daughter of the former CSU General Secretary Georg Tandler, to initiate contact. Tandler and her partner Darius N. are said to have received a total of 48 million euros in commissions from Emix. The amount was so generous because of the high prices.

Waste of tax money in a big way?

Andrea Tandler and Darius N. reject all allegations through lawyers. Hohlmeier has always emphasized that she never received any money for mediation. There is no indication of that either. The official, the Berlin investigators suspect, could have wasted tax money on a large scale with the two orders. Last year, the Federal Court of Auditors criticized the Ministry of Health’s ordering practice for Emix, because the Spahn Ministry already had much cheaper offers for FFP2 masks at the time the order was placed with Emix.

On March 27, 2020, the federal government started a so-called open-house procedure, in which every dealer could deliver FFP2 masks to the ministry at a fixed price of 4.50 euros each. Several hundred offers from dealers had been received just four days after the start of the tender. The tender ended prematurely on April 8th. At that point, the Ministry of Health already had commitments to supply more than a billion FFP2 masks. So why, the investigators are now asking themselves, should Spahn and his official then buy corona masks at much higher prices from Emix?

Official claims emergency

The official has previously presented his view to the investigators in Munich: In his view, everything was fine. In the emergency situation at the time, when the fight against the virus in old people’s homes and clinics was a matter of life and death, the ministry could not have acted differently. Spahn himself recently commented on the mask deals in his book “We will have to forgive each other a lot”. He admitted that the margins of many intermediaries were “outrageously high” and that many would have done good business in times of need. Ultimately, however, he sees it the same way as NRW Health Minister Karl-Josef Laumann (CDU): “Anyone who doesn’t have the state audit office screwed after the crisis has done everything wrong.”

The investigators are unlikely to be satisfied with this explanation. With the Emix deals with the Federal Ministry of Health, the Berlin public prosecutor believes that they have enough reasons to now also investigate the senior officials in the Ministry of Health – mainly because of the contract for 540 million euros from April 23, 2020. The emergency was there the masks were no longer as big as in the weeks before, shortly after the beginning of the pandemic. Among other things, a Corona situation report by the Bavarian Ministry of Health from April 9, 2020 could be fatal for the official.

“This means that more attention has to be paid to quality and price again”

That management report states: “Prices for PPE are currently falling as the market action resumes.” PSA stands for “Personal Protective Equipment”, and this includes FFP2 masks in particular. The conclusion of Bavaria’s Ministry of Health on April 9, 2020 was: “This means that more attention must be paid to quality and price again.” Nevertheless, two weeks later, the Federal Ministry of Health ordered 100 million masks from Emix for 540 million euros.

The extension of the preliminary investigation that has now become known is of fundamental importance. For the first time, a public prosecutor’s office is investigating in a major Corona case how far the state can open its tills in a major crisis. Where does the state’s defense against an emergency end, and where does an illegal waste of tax money begin, in which authorities and ministries throw the citizens’ money after profiteers, so to speak, or spend it too carelessly?