Contracts, Data and Investigations – COVID-19: Edition 2020-07-17
This week: Public contracts under scrutiny in the UK and US, rings of corruption in the Kyrgyz Republic, tracking MDB’s COVID-19 procurement
This newsletter gathers stories covering the use and abuse of government contracts during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. If you like it, hit the heart button and share with your colleagues. Let us know about your stories and content. We, Sophie and Georg, would love to hear about them.
The proof is in the extensions. In the UK, the National Health Service’s data store contract with American big data analytics firm Palantir, originally worth £1 and awarded without competition, has just been extended for four months at a value of £1 million, Oscar Williams at NS Tech finds. It’s one in a string of dubious contracts, fast-tracked under emergency rules, that are attracting criticism. George Monbiot gives a run-down of some of the most brazen deals in an opinion piece for the Guardian, concluding that secretly awarded contracts simply ‘stink’.
No-bid contracts face similar scrutiny across the pond, including those of the consultancy giant McKinsey, which has racked up more than $100 million worth of deals with local and federal US agencies since the pandemic began, an investigation by Ian MacDoughall for ProPublica shows. At the New York Times, Sheryl Gay Stolberg examines a controversial sole-source contract to run a centralized Covid-19 database, which critics say duplicates the existing system used by health authorities.
After registering his medical supplies firm in March, ex-political fundraiser Mike Gula used his connections to secure over $600 million in contracts, according to records obtained by the Wall Street Journal’s Brody Mullins.
In good news, formal investigations into masks and PPE deals have kicked off in the US. In a letter to administration officials, congressional investigators claim that over “445 companies had no prior experience in the federal marketplace before receiving awards related to the pandemic response,” reports NPR’s Dina Temple-Raston and Robert Benincasa.
In an analysis for Devex, Janadale Leene Coralde and Miguel Antonio Tamonan track how much procurement information is made public by international development banks about the estimated $24 trillion they’ve pledged to combat COVID-19 worldwide. Hint: It’s not much.
Kyrgyz media outlet Kloop’s latest investigation exposes so-called rings of corruption that run collusion rackets in public procurement. The investigation, by Ekaterina Reznikova, links up procurement and beneficiary data to show how Kyrgyz businessmen created an illusion of competition in deals worth around US$1 million. The project includes a new interactive tool and 21 pre-defined rings for analysis.
In an ongoing investigation into state capture in South Africa, OCCRP’s Khadija Sharife and Mark Anderson reveal that an investment firm linked to the infamous Gupta family charged the state transport company US$2.8 million for property management services that it never provided.
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Competition in contracts: how and why to calculate it. Very few governments release public and timely data on how competitive their public contracts are. That’s a shame because it’s a good indicator of whether they’re getting value for money, corruption risks, and whether suppliers have a fair chance of participating in the market. Colombia is one of the exceptions. It’s procurement agency began tracking and publicly sharing its competition data in real-time as part of recent open contracting reforms. We ran the numbers and found a slice of the market has become more competitive. Check out OCP’s data notebook for our analysis of how competition rose between 2018 and 2019. It’s part of our new story on how Colombia’s procurement reforms offer a blueprint for governments to reboot the economy after the pandemic.
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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 Sophie or Georg at media@open-contracting.org. Thanks for reading.
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