Contracts, Data and Investigations – COVID-19: Edition 2020-11-20
Contracts, Data and Investigations – COVID-19: Edition 2020-11-20
This week’s content: UK’s National Audit Office report on COVID-19 contracts and the ‘chumocracy’, Contract pearls of the Caribbean, and more from Ecuador, El Salvador, and the US
This newsletter gathers stories covering the use and abuse of government contracts during the COVID-19 pandemic and beyond. We’d really be happy about a like, and let us know about your stories and content. We’d love to hear about them.
Our focus is back to the UK: The National Audit Office, UK’s public spending watchdog, has published an investigation into the country’s emergency procurement. Astute readers of this newsletter might have already suspected that a lot has gone awry in UK procurement, even for what can be expected in an emergency. The Guardian’s David Pegg, Felicity Lawrence, and David Conn detail the “high-priority lane” established for firms providing PPE services that had been referred by officials, ministers’ offices, MPs, peers, and senior NHS staff. The success rate was about one in ten in awarded contracts compared with one in 100 for those going through the normal process. In total, by the end of July, more than 8,600 contracts with a value of £18bn had been awarded, the majority of which without any competition. Some contracts were awarded retrospectively, write Tabby Kinder, Gill Plimmer, and Jim Pickard in the Financial Times.
BBC’s Phill Kemp finds that officials at the UK’s safety agency had ‘political’ pressure to approve protective suites bought by the government and a Spanish businessman-turned-middleman who pocketed $28 million for brokering PPE contracts.
Earlier in the week, The Guardian’s David Conn, David Pegg, Rob Evans, Juliette Garside, and Felicity Lawrence investigated the “Chumocracy”, a web of connections in awarding contracts and appointments during the pandemic.
Sophie Hill has built My Little Crony, an interactive visualization to track these links between senior government politicians and companies being awarded government contracts. Read about how she did it in the Byline Times.
In the US, Sydney Lupkin reports that Novavax, a drugmaker participating in the government’s Operation Warp Speed project to develop a vaccine, has released its $1.6 billion contract that the government didn’t disclose.
Pearls of power: Investigations in spending at the local level, where power and money are often closely linked, are critical to ensure accountable decisions. Tatiana Velásquez Archibold investigates emergency contracts in Barranquilla, Colombia’s Caribbean for La Contratopedia Caribe.
For El Salvador’s Revista FACTum, Loida Avelar and Andrea Maida investigate 17 cases of irregularities in emergency procurement for protective equipment and food worth $18 millon centering around the Ministry of Health.
Ecuador’s civil society organization Fundación Ciudadanía y Desarrollo, as part of its citizen observatory, has published a report on emergency procurement spending at the municipal level. This work is supported by the Open Contracting Partnership.
National Audit Office head Gareth Davies: “While we recognise that these were exceptional circumstances, it remains essential that decisions are properly documented and made transparent if government is to maintain public trust that taxpayers’ money is being spent appropriately and fairly.”
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 Georg at media@open-contracting.org. Thanks for reading.
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