Contracts, Data and Investigations: COVID-19 – Edition 2020-05-01
More procurement boondoggles, COVID-19 scams, COVID-19 market movers and shakers, corruption, and aid money
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.
First, more stories on procurement boondoggles. Some of the stories of random suppliers snatching up contracts would be funny if they weren’t so serious. A Bosnian raspberry farm scored a contract for ventilators, the OCCRP’s Zdravko Ljubas revealed. A Silicon Valley engineer pocketed $69 million for ventilators, which never materialized, showed an investigation by Buzzfeed News’ Rosalind Adams and Ken Bensinger. The Canadian province of Manitoba canceled a $5 million contract for gowns and goggles, leaving the supplier, a local wholesale importer of fireworks, in the lurch.
A ventilator is not a ventilator. Many governments are finding this out the hard way, including the UK, as Sky News reports. In the global hunt for ventilators, smaller countries have the weakest hand, shows this investigation by El Surtidor’s Jazmín Acuña and Romina Cáceres into the prices paid by Paraguay’s health ministry.
The biggest players in the market are becoming clearer, with a Bloomberg Government report identifying the leading health equipment suppliers and drugmakers in the US. The Guardian’s Samanth Subramanian takes us inside the global mass market for masks. And in Japan, a mysterious unnamed supplier took part in a mask hand out scheme, The Mainichi Shimbun reports.
Poor countries, war zones, and fragile states will rely on aid money more than ever. Ben Parker of The New Humanitarian is keeping track of the billions of dollars committed, as is Lisa Cornish of Devex in this interactive about who’s funding what. (We argue this spending should be fully transparent.)
It’s not news that the health sector faces the biggest risk of corruption and COVID-19 will have a long-term impact in many ways, including approaches to health care reform. The Washington Post’s Anthony Faiola and Ana Vanessa Herrero identify a pandemic of corruption in the Americas and Andrea Sparaciari analyzes the risks for Business Insider Italy.
Finally, in a detailed review of inflated food prices in municipalities of Colombia, La Silla Vacia found out that the excess costs could have fed more than 50,000 families for a month. Check out the spreadsheet behind the investigation and the methodological note.
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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