Contracts, Data and Investigations: Edition 2021-03-05
This week's content: an unredacted Pfizer vaccine contract, oxygen contracts in Peru, re-labeled masks in Austria, and an increase in internet & phone contracts at US’ tax offices
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.
An unredacted Pfizer contract obtained by KEI’s Luis Gil Abinader with the Dominican Republic shows broad legal action immunity across every step of the chain: manufacturing, clinical testing, and packaging. The contract is accessible here and was obtained via a Freedom of Information request.
UNICEF has a Vaccine Market Dashboard including a summary of prices by vaccine and agreements for each country, and NPR’s Jason Beaubien analyzes the wildly different prices. Also, bilateral deals by rich countries are undercutting COVAX’s efforts to source vaccines for developing countries, writes Geoffrey York for The Globe and Mail. (We say contracts should be fully transparent to provide a fair deal for all countries).
An analysis by Ojo Público shows that only 1 in 5 agencies in Peru have published information on contracts to purchase oxygen that is used to treat Covid-patients, which is in increasingly short supply in the region. 36% of contracts are published incompletely. Ojo Público had identified last year that the government was relying on only two suppliers.
In a four-part series for CONNECTAS, Arturo Torres, María Belén Arroyo, Lok Cheng, Christian Torres, and Alejandro Pérez look into the deals made by Chinese laboratories in Latin America for rapid COVID-19 tests and other medical equipment. Read the story of one of the largest of these contracts for nearly 1 million tests in Ecuador. Half did not arrive, and those that did were questioned for being faulty.
Wonder how remote working by US tax officials at the IRS affected public contracts? A Bloomberg Government analysis shows that telecommunication firms such as AT&T and Verizon, information technology, law, and consulting firms won out in a pandemic government contracting boom. Treasury deals account for $326 million of a total of $53 billion in Covid-related contracts across federal agencies, report Lydia O'Neal and Siri Bulusu for Bloomberg Tax.
In Austria, a mask deal celebrated for going to an Austrian business turned out to have used imported masks from China and changed its labels, reportedly using illicit employees, write Jan Michael Marchart, Andreas Schnauder, Fabian Schmid, Leopold Stefan for Der Standard.
In Germany, DER SPIEGEL’s Sven Becker, Jürgen Dahlkamp, Gunther Latsch, Sven Röbel, Jonas Schaible, and Gerald Traufetter report how businesses and lobbyists used contacts into parliament to win sell masks at up to €9.90 apiece. One parliamentarian allegedly received a deal brokerage fee of €660.000. Tobias Heimbach at Business Insider has more details on the negotiations.
The US Air Force wasted $549 million on 20 faulty Italian-made cargo planes for the Afghan government. Long delays in delivering spare parts, maintenance problems, and safety complaints made the planes unusable. They were turned into scrap metal in 2014, selling for $40,257, reports Dan De Luce for NBC News.
Benchmarking agencies in Nigeria: Our partners at the Public and Private Development Centre (PPDC) have benchmarked 170 of Nigeria's ministries, departments, and agencies on how much of their public deals they disclose on the country's procurement portal NOCOPO. Get the ranking here http://budeshi.ng/occr
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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