Contracts, Data and Investigations – Edition 2021-08-06
This week: Vaccine deals and profits, COVID-19 test supply problems in Germany and the UK, Ekiti’s public contracts, US defense contractors in Afghanistan
This newsletter gathers stories covering the use and abuse of government contracts during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. Share your stories and investigations with us. We’d love to read and feature them. And we’d appreciate a like if you enjoyed the read.
The Guardian’s Julia Kollewe gives a rundown of COVID-19 vaccine deals and prices around the world as some manufacturers start raising prices.
The US paid billions to get enough COVID-19 vaccines by the end of 2020 as part of Operation Warp Speed. But Pfizer’s $2-billion contract contained limited reporting requirements to the federal government when there was a delay. This meant the government didn’t know how many doses were really on their way, according to an investigation by NPR’s Sydney Lupkin.
Travelers may be allowed to enter the UK again, but not all of them are getting their COVID-19 test kits. Testing services for travelers were outsourced to private companies, including one firm with ties to the Labour Party that was accused of failing to deliver PCR tests and results, forcing customers to turn to the taxpayer-funded NHS service, writes The Guardian’s Rob Davies.
In Germany, a contract to supply more than 2 million COVID-19 tests for school students was awarded without tender to a consortium involving a former arms lobbyist and a newly registered company, according to Business Insider’s Jan Wehmeyer. Unable to deliver the tests themselves, the consortium acted as a broker, took a big commission, then got into a dispute with the subcontractors. In the chaos, the buyer reportedly received substantially more tests than agreed in the contract and lost track of the payment.
Europe’s border agency Frontex spent a sixth of its budget on air surveillance this year, reports Matthias Monroy for Netzpolitik, using data from the European procurement portal TED.
As the US prepared to end its 20 year military presence in Afghanistan, big defense firms were awarded contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars for work set to continue past the withdrawal date, according to Open Secret’s Anna Massoglia and Julia Forrest.
Nigeria’s state of Ekiti has started publishing open data on its public procurement – you can access the dashboard here – already publishing details on more than 1,000 public contracts. But an investigation by Dataphyte found that the state’s contracting data is missing company names and other details needed to properly track procurement spending.
A collaborative investigation into $10 million worth of shipping containers that were meant to be used as mobile health clinics in Kenya suggests the supplier has ties to political leaders. Legal loopholes leave procurement vulnerable to abuse, conclude the OCCRP’s Kira Zalan, Finance Uncovered’s Purity Mukami, The Elephant’s Juliet Atellah and Africa Uncensored’s John-Allan Namu.
Mexico’s Institute for Competitiveness, IMCO, has released a corruption risk index using data on almost half a million public contracts from 278 federal agencies to identify bad procurement practices by government institutions.
You never know just what you’ll find when analyzing COVID-19 contracts. On a data deep dive this week for our COVID-19 Contract Explorer, OCP’s lead data standard specialist Yohanna Lisnichuk discovered Chile’s government bought white wine for elderly residents who had to stay home during the pandemic. Who else wants to retire in Chile now?
Need some tips or inspiration for a contracting investigation? Join this year’s Global Investigative Journalism Conference, taking place online from 1-5 November, and check out this tipsheet on researching government contracts.
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 you’ve written to share? Write to Sophie and Georg at gneumann@open-contracting.org. Thanks for reading.
Did a friend forward you this email? Click here to subscribe