Contracts, Data and Investigations: COVID-19 – Edition 2020-04-24
The scramble for medical supplies in Europe, outsourcing in the UK, Centinela COVID-19, access to information in Spain and more
This newsletter gathers stories covering the use and abuse of government contracts during the COVID-19 pandemic. Subscribe now to receive this newsletter regularly. And please send us your stories and content. We, Hera, Sophie and Georg, would love to hear about them.
Under pressure to rapidly procure medical supplies, many European countries are forgoing procedures designed to ensure government purchases are transparent, efficient, and free of corruption. Transparency advocates worry that the secrecy will make it difficult to discover in the long-term whether COVID-19 procurements were clean and honest, writes Ilya Lozovsky in an in-depth feature for OCCRP.
Private companies can play an important role in the government’s coronavirus response. But The Guardian’s Juliette Garside reports what can go wrong with COVID-19 testing at a center in the UK run by the accounting firm Deloitte. We’ll be looking at more stories that involve outsourcing of public services next week.
For Brazil’s Folha de São Paulo, Fabio Zanini and Italo Nogueira checked each state’s compliance with the country’s new emergency laws. They found the states worst hit by the pandemic were the least open about their contracts.
In Guatemala, Pavel Gerardo Vega of Plaza Pública sifted through the country’s public procurement portal to identify companies with suspected ties to the deputy health minister. After the revelation, several health officials were fired for allegedly conspiring to defraud state funds, reports Al Jazeera. Purchases of medical supplies will also be an area explored by the new collaborative project Centinela COVID-19, which brings together 14 Latin American media outlets to cover the pandemic, says Andrés Bermúdez Liévano, a coordinator of the project and editor of CLIP.
But the challenges to access essential information for in-depth investigations into government spending can be immense. Spain has put public information requests on hold, and contracts of the Ministry of Health haven’t been published for a month, a piece by El País’s Elena Sevillano revealed.
Amid the global scramble for antibody tests (get a glimpse into the chaos and competition in this article by Anita Chabria, Emily Baumgaertner and Melanie Mason of the Los Angeles Times), the UK took a gamble by purchasing millions of unproven tests from China that authorities said turned out to be ineffective. But the UK is not alone in managing the fall out of faulty or unsuitable supplies, as reports on COVID-19 testing kits in India, Israel, and elsewhere have shown.
Nigerian data journalist Oluwatoyin Odegbaroye analyzed budget estimates and other data sources to calculate how special coronavirus response funds, if managed properly, could boost the health systems of local governments.
There was a week where it was easier for me to find four planes to go get respirators from China than it was to find legitimate suppliers of respirators.
Michael Owh
General Manager, Purchasing and Contract Services,
County of Los Angeles
For our recommendations, resources and tools, check our COVID-19 resource page.
This newsletter has been put together by the Open Contracting Partnership. Comments? Suggestions? Got a story to share? Write to Hera, Sophie or Georg at media@open-contracting.org. Thanks for reading.
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