https://www.occrp.org/en/coronavirus/questionable-paperwork-lets-fake-and-faulty-masks-flood-europe
As COVID-19 swept through Europe in March, the director of Lithuania’s Central Prison Hospital was relieved to receive 3,000 FFP2 respirator masks, the gold standard for filtering out tiny airborne particles, like the coronavirus that causes the disease.
The masks arrived in boxes plastered with the CE mark, the immediately recognizable symbol showing that products have been verified as meeting European standards. This status was backed by documents from one of the continent’s major certification firms. Everything seemed to be in order.
But what hospital officials didn’t know was that the CE marks on the Chinese-made masks were fake, and the documents meaningless. The shipment had been exported by a company whose owner is wanted by the Chinese authorities, and the masks in the boxes had never been tested to European standards.
An investigation by OCCRP and 16 European media partners found scores of cases in which PPE was sold throughout Europe using documents that make it look like the goods meet the bloc’s complex safety rules. In reality, the papers are legally worthless.
These documents are sold by European companies, including one with a long history in the continent’s safety industry, and can cost tens of thousands of euros each. Sometimes even the purchasers are unaware that the certificates have no legal basis.