Contracts, Data and Investigations – Edition 2021-09-24
This week: UK parliament questions PPE deals, emergency contracts audited in Ecuador and Philippines, Pfizer’s liability waiver in Brazil, and new procurement data in Costa Rica
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 love a like if you enjoyed the read.
Parliaments, auditors and journalists continue to trawl through the billions spent on emergency procurement.
The UK health department is seeking to recover the costs of undelivered or substandard PPE, the former health minister has said. The department’s review of its contracts has so far led to “commercial discussions (potentially leading to litigation)” involving 40 PPE deals with a combined value of £1.2 billion, said the minister, responding to a question in parliament. Meanwhile, some 1.9 billion items have been categorized as ‘do not supply’ stock, representing 6.2% of purchased volume, with an estimated value of £2.8 billion.
In the Philippines, about P550 million (US$11 million) worth of COVID-19 testing kits have expired, reports Rappler’s Lian Buan. And an investigation by the Philippine Cebu City council found irregularities in the City’s spending that were overlooked in the official audit, such as overpriced cans of sardines distributed as relief during the first year of the pandemic, and the construction of a multi-million-peso quarantine facility, report the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism’s Caecent No-ot Magsumol and Mary Ruth Malinao on Rappler.
The value of Malaysia’s COVID-19 related emergency contracts is RM593 million (US$140 million), the health minister has reported to parliament, according to The Edge Markets.
In Ecuador, only 6% of audits carried out on emergency procurement showed no irregularities, according to the country’s state auditor office, the El Universal reports. In total, 268 audits were carried out, with the auditor’s office detecting a lack of information on emergency justifications, contracts, and invoices, as well as reference prices. Almost 8,000 emergency processes have been awarded so far, based to the country’s open data portal.
As the (so far very limited) side effects of the vaccines become clearer, manufacturers have been accused of pressuring governments into liability waivers. In its $1 billion deal, Brazil agreed to indefinitely exempt Pfizer from any civil liability for serious side-effects arising from the use of the vaccine, report The Guardian’s Mattha Busby and Flávia Milhorance from Rio de Janeiro. What’s more, the contract also stipulated that Brazil would cede to US courts, convened secretly, in the event of any contractual disputes.
In Hungary, Direkt36’s Panyi Szabolcs and Pethő András find that a media company owner and Orbán critic was monitored by Pegasus spyware when another firm led by him was contracted by an opposition party.
An audit office inquiry in Australia finds that more than half of the government’s procurement is awarded via limited tender, reports Judy Skatssoon for Government News.
Costa Rica’s historic data on its public procurement is now available through the new Public Contracts Observatory run by the Ministry of Finance. The data can be accessed as CSV here.
***
Catching crooks in Kazakhstan with risk indicators: Business analytics firm Datanomix has partnered with the country’s financial police to identify economic crimes using data tools. The company created a list of 43 individual risk indicators that could be calculated automatically using newly available data, spanning all procurement stages from planning to contract execution. One dubious contract saw a kindergarten pay US$500 per ream of paper. Read the full story.
***
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