Contracts, Data and Investigations: Edition 2021-03-12
This week: 13 Latin American countries change their laws to get the vaccine, vaccine costs for India and Hungary, German parliamentarian’s role in mask deals expanding, Ukraine’s ventilator purchases
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.
Under pressure to secure vaccine deals, 13 countries in Latin America changed their laws to meet demands from companies to increase confidentiality and put deals behind locks. The new laws provide financial indemnity and a full transfer of risks onto the government, including for questions of logistics and transport. The investigation was carried out by the Latin American investigative journalism network Red Palta, including LA NACION Data (Argentina), Datasketch (Colombia), El Faro (El Salvador), Ojo con mi Pisto (Guatemala), PODER (Mexico), Ojo Público (Peru), and la diaria (Uruguay). Read the investigation in Spanish.
For The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, Madlen Davies and Rosa Furneaux analyze the binding term sheet between Pfizer and the Dominican Republic that became public last week. The country paid $24 for each two-dose vaccine, consistent with the price paid by other countries in Latin America. Bloomberg’s Stephanie Baker, Cynthia Koons, and Vernon Silver explore Pfizer’s fast, fraught, and lucrative vaccine development and distribution and find that the distribution wasn’t run by an algorithm, but an “opaque process that appears to have involved a mix of order size, position in the queue, production forecasts, calls from world leaders, the potential to advance the science, and of course the desire to make a profit.”
Hungary agreed to pay about $36 for the Chinese vaccine Sinopharm according to the contract made public by the Prime Minister’s chief of staff via Facebook, report Sui-Lee Wee and Benjamin Novak for the New York Times.
India has renegotiated its price for Covishield, the Oxford-AstraZeneca vaccine manufactured by Serum Institute of India, from ₹210 ($2.90) per dose to around ₹157.50 ($2.17), reports Hindustan Times.
For Ukraine’s investigative news outlet, Nashigroshi Olga Prokopyshyna investigates the companies, prices, and schemes behind the country’s purchases of 1,794 ventilators totaling UAH 1.28 billion. The analysis provides a detailed breakdown of prices and models purchased. All data is available as Excel.
As investigations into the deals by parliamentarians of the conservative party in Germany are expanding, in an investigation for abgeordnetenwatch and t-online Martin Reyher analyzes the opaque offshore company structures behind the consultancy companies, and Johannes Mueller-Töwe looks at public contracts won by one legislator.
An exclusive by Fabian Löhe at Der Tagesspiegel finds that consultancy costs at Germany’s Ministry of Finance have increased by 600%, from €5.3m in 2015 to €30.4m in 2019. One IT project leader earned 646.000 Euro between 2018-19.
Lacking planning and testing, platforms to register and find vaccines have not been up to the task, at least for those of us based out of the US. The latest is the Massachusetts Vaxfinder website potentially raking up $250,000 in costs and its octopus error message becoming famous, reports Boston Herald’s Lisa Kashinsky. Further north, Canada’s British Columbia government simply would not release the contract for its COVID-19 vaccine appointment call centers that got off to a rocky start, writes CBC’s Laura Dhillon Kane.
An investigation by PODER’s Claudia Ocaranza published on Proceso, looks into purchases of medicines by Mexico’s Social Security Institute. It finds that between 2008 and 2018, only 36 out of 1000 pesos budgeted were spent on 17 drugs needed to treat breast cancer. Analyzing nearly 5,000 contracts valued at MXN18m, more than a third report price increases of over 20%. A concentration of providers and purchases that are not aligned with the regional demand are some other bad practices uncovered.
For our recommendations, resources and tools, check our COVID-19 resource page. Our friends at the GIJN have pulled together some tips and tricks for investigating public procurement. This newsletter has been put together by the Open Contracting Partnership. Comments? Suggestions? Got a story you’ve written to share? Write to Georg at gneumann@open-contracting.org. Thanks for reading.
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