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A deal to bring 150,000 masks to Ireland from China fell through after a fundraising group discovered that the € 108,000 bill was to be paid to Irish festival management company Roqu Media International rather than to a Chinese wholesaler.
Roqu, a company that paid € 14.1 million from HSE to import fans from China, had offered masks to Covid Heroes Aid fundraisers at a cost of € 0.72 per unit.
Heroes Aid, a group led by Co Galway Public Health Nurse and former City Councilor Mary Leahy, had contacted Paul O’Brien, a native of Cork with knowledge of supply lines and Chinese markets. , to bring Type II R surgical masks to Ireland in mid-April.
The group had initially worked with Conor McGregor to distribute € 1.5 million in personal protective equipment. [PPE] that the MMA fighter had purchased from Irish hospitals in April 2020, at a time of global PPE shortages.
The group subsequently received around € 200,000 through fundraising and direct donations, which led to their contact with Roqu through Mr. O’Brien.
However, when Heroes Aid volunteer Doug Leddin requested an invoice from Mr. O’Brien, he responded with a document payable to Roqu, based in Ireland.
“All the invoices I had seen up to this point came from the factory in China,” Leddin said. “Why would we pay an Irish company we’ve never heard of € 100,000 of money donated by the public?”
O’Brien did not respond to the Irish Examiner’s request for comment.
Leahy said Heroes Aid “was never in contact with Roqu,” adding that he had vaguely heard of Robert Quirke, the owner and CEO of Roqu, but had had “some connection with Paul O’Brien.”
A long conversation between Mr. Leddin and Mr. O’Brien via WhatsApp message preceded the delivery of Roqu’s invoice, with the former repeatedly requesting trade certificates and images of the products in question from Mr. O’Brien to allay fears of potential gains. on the supply side by setting a cost per mask.
Mr. O’Brien told Mr. Leddin that it was not possible to “ask for that information and I would not expect someone to give it to me.”
“I have not received any documentation or information on these masks, other than an invoice from an Irish media company,” Leddin replied.
Later, O’Brien presented several certificates about the masks, although all were in Chinese text.
Roqu’s price of € 108,000 for Type II R surgical masks was equivalent to a cost per unit of € 0.72. However, Leddin and fellow volunteer Joe Naughton refused to approve the deal offered.
Two weeks after the deal fell through, an Irish supplier in Hong Kong provided Heroes Aid with an alternative price of € 0.52 per unit, which is equivalent to a comparative loss of € 30,000 on the 150,000 skins Roqu offers.
O’Brien stopped collaborating with Heroes Aid in late April, citing fatigue and anguish at the suggestion that speculation might have been involved in the proposed deal.
The Hong Kong agreement was subsequently adopted and the masks were distributed to Irish hospitals.
It recently emerged that the ventilators that Roqu brought to Ireland for the HSE in April were subsequently deemed unusable by the Irish health service.
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