Contracts, Data and Investigations - Edition 73
This time: #GICJ23 recap + tips + resources, South Africa declares vaccine contracts in public interest, earthquake restoration in Mexico, stories from Bangladesh, Czechia & more
In this newsletter, we cover stories about the use and abuse of public contracts and provide tips and insights on how to investigate public procurement. Are you investigating a public contract right now? Get in touch – we’d love to help.
[A quick recap of the Global Investigative Journalism Conference 2023 in Gothenburg]
What kind of contractor is known as an Everything Bagel? Who would buy carpets with the face of Kazakhstan’s president emblazoned on them? Just how much can someone claim a school notebook is worth? These curious cases kicked off our panel at the recent Global Investigative Journalism conference in Gothenburg. In a packed 200-capacity room, speakers from Protenge (Kazakhstan), Dataphyte (Nigeria) and Contratopedia Caribe (Colombia) shared their advice on digging into public contracts and making them come to life for their audiences. For the speakers’ insights and tipsheets, check the data tools & resources section below.
For those new to this newsletter, you can access standardized open data on public contracts from 50 countries here, and we’ve just put together a page with tips, tricks & resources on red flags, and stories by journalists.
With 2100 journalists from 130 countries, this year’s conference was massive. It was an appropriate setting for Dave Kaplan’s final one as the head of GIJN and his final concert with The Muckrakers. Congrats to Emilia Díaz-Struck who will take over. It’s been an inspiration to meet so many amazing journalists – from Germany to Japan, and from Mexico to Zimbabwe – and get to know more about their investigations – planned, ongoing or even recent ones, some of which are included in this edition.
Some of my take-aways:
The more local public contracts are, the more often they are the main way to control power, influence and money. While the stories may not always make national headlines, it matters when a health center is fixed or not. When school buildings in your area are crumbling, you notice when £32m is used to refurbish the UK’s ministry of education headquarters.
Freedom of Information requests are still the main way to find out more about public contracts. We need more timely, structured open data. And maybe we can do more to structure the information received by these requests.
International crime and corruption is increasingly connected, and while public contracts are just one piece of it, they can provide a useful entry point. We need to do more to connect contracts to company registers (check out the great work by our friends at Open Ownership) and look into exposed sectors, like construction, migration and logistics.
[What we are keeping an eye on]
Vaccine contracts: With the Fall wave of COVID-19 in full swing, and vaccine booster roll-out at least in the US anything but smooth, it came as good news when South Africa’s High Court in Pretoria ruled in favor of disclosing vaccine contracts. It’s worth reviewing the ruling, as it will provide a useful precedent for making the public interest case for public contracts even beyond an immediate health emergency. Check out the full ruling and the contracts on the website of the Health Justice Initiative who sued the government. On 29 September, we expect the release of meeting and negotiation notes.
Globe and Mail’s Geoffrey York provides an analysis of the contracts highlighting that big pharma companies had monopoly power on Covid vaccines, and they used that power to extract big profits. For example, India’s Serum Institute charged South Africa $5.35 a dose, which was 2.5 times more than it charged the EU. And an important note that this was profiteering, but not necessarily kickbacks and corruption. For those, you had mask purchases.
An in-depth investigation by 5°Elemento’s Carmen García Bermejo and Thelma Gómez Durán looks at the reconstruction of more than 2000 historic buildings after Mexico’s 2017 earthquake. One out of four buildings are still in ruins and contractors included booking agents and tax firms with little knowledge of restoration.
[Data insights]
Bangladesh: An analysis by Transparency International Bangladesh finds one in five contracts was awarded through single-bid contracts over an 11-year period, representing 15% of total e-contract values or more than US$5 billion (Tk 60,000 crore). Limited competition is a corruption risk. Read the full study here. In 2021, Bangladesh launched a citizen portal on public procurement information that is run by the Central Procurement Technical Unit.
Czech Republic: Building on internal emails and other documents, Seznam Zpravy’s Vojtěch Blažek reveals how companies linked to the largest Czech construction firm Metrostav secretly - and successfully - colluded to win a US$1.3 billion (CZK 30 billion) contract for a Prague metro extension.
South Africa: amaBhungane’s Susan Comrie investigates the lucrative business of a family leasing utility vehicles – from front-end-loaders to bulldozers to water tankers – to the government, despite being indicted for collusion in the past and currently facing corruption charges. Corruption Watch South Africa has analyzed the country’s public procurement and found a worrying increase in contract deviations and extensions. See the full report here and listen to an audio interview with Motlatsi Komote at Corruption Watch here.
[Tips from practitioners]
In a GIJC session on FOIA/RTI investigations, MuckRock’s Amanda Hickman shared useful tips for investigating public contracts from her experience supporting FOIA requests.
Companies like to brag about who they work with, especially if it’s a big government contract. This apparently includes surveillance tech companies, as Motherboard’s Matthew Gault and Jason Koebler found when investigating the drone company Skydio. They uncovered how some cops have become product evangelists for the firm, which has supplied autonomous drones to dozens of police departments.
You can check a company’s marketing material or their investor reports. Once you find the mention of a government agency, you can FOIA it. Rather than asking if there are ANY contracts with company X, you can ask for ALL of the contracts with company X. You can see all of the completed requests that went into the Skydio reporting.
For a story on safety net contracts, Hickman worked with investigative reporter Tracie McMillan to present a searchable, sortable table of all contracts reviewed in the investigation. This tipsheet provides some helpful guiding questions and language when requesting information.
[Data tools & resources]
And to close off this newsletter, here are the resources and presentations of the GIJC session I moderated on Digging into Government Contracting: Finding Patterns, Tracking Corruption, Telling Stories.
In insightful presentations, Adenike Aloba (Dataphyte, Nigeria) shared lessons on investigating overpriced school notebooks despite poor data and capacity, Jamilya Maricheva (Protenge, Kazakhstan) shared how investigating government contracts can compete with cats on Instagram (presentation), and Tatiana Velásquez presented her methodology to investigate public contracts for local media website Contratopedia Caribe in Colombia (tipsheet). Here’s my presentation and the OCP tipsheet on investigating government contracts too.
And the answers to our questions at the start? An Everything Bagel is a contract or company that supplies a range of unrelated goods, works or services. A local mayor bought 50 carpets with the face of Kazakhstan’s President Tokayev on them, and in Nigeria, the price of a $1 school notebook was inflated by 10 times.
When it’s hard to visualize your public procurement, a cat with a gold chain can play the role of a pension fund, and a pug can be a greedy supplier.
This newsletter has been put together by the Open Contracting Partnership. Thanks for reading. Do give us a like if you’ve enjoyed the read. Did a friend forward you this email?