"Spahn, who is now parliamentary group leader for Chancellor Friedrich Merz's conservative Christian Democrats (CDU), procured huge quantities of protective face masks at apparently greatly inflated prices. One employee of the Federal Audit Office, which monitors government expenditure, said Spahn's Health Ministry bought about 5.8 billion masks at a unit price of around 1 each. Well over half of them were never distributed and later had to be destroyed."
""We see this as massive overprocurement," said the expert from the Federal Audit Office, which monitors the use of taxpayers' money. The health minister ultimately failed to accept or pay for a large number of the masks he ordered. Germany's government could face payments of some 2.3 billion ($2.7 billion) to health product manufacturers if courts rule against it in the dozens of lawsuits that have been filed over the issue."
Jens Spahn was called as a witness by a Bundestag enquete commission examining state actions during the coronavirus pandemic. Spahn, Germany's health minister from 2018 to 2021, procured huge quantities of protective face masks at apparently greatly inflated prices. The Federal Audit Office reported the Health Ministry bought about 5.8 billion masks at a unit price of around 1 each, with well over half never distributed and later destroyed. The Audit Office described the purchases as massive overprocurement. The minister ultimately failed to accept or pay for many orders, exposing the government to roughly 2.3 billion euros in potential legal liabilities. Spahn defended the decisions as necessary to avoid overwhelming healthcare systems and later acknowledged that he might have acted differently in hindsight.
Read at www.dw.com
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