Contracts, Data and Investigations - Edition 82
This month: Flood control contractors in the Philippines, defense spending data in Europe, tracking mining royalties in Colombia, and open contracting data in Brazil.
Welcome back to our newsletter, covering stories about the use and abuse of public contracts and providing 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.
After a slightly longer break, we are back with some of the highlights from the last months. There hasn’t been a shortage of stories, so let’s get to it.
[What we’re keeping an eye on]
The Philippines has been battered in recent months – by typhoons Kalmaegi and Fung-wong on the one hand and corruption allegations involving flood management projects on the other. Official investigations, including a ten-hour Senate inquiry, surfaced allegations of hundreds of nonexistent “ghost” projects, dangerously flawed construction, and procurement deals cornered by a few favored contractors. ABS-CBN’s David Dizon has a timeline of key events. Guinevere Latoza of the Philippine Center for Investigative Journalism (PICJ) looks at the data and contractors behind the flood-control projects (with more details about the companies here). Rappler’s Val A. Villanueva investigates the workings of a web of construction firms involved. Rappler also analysed nearly 20,000 contracts of the Department of Public Works linked to public officials since 2016. Now, it’s the protestors who are flooding the streets.
Let’s talk about Albania’s AI procurement minister. Touted as the world’s first AI government official, “Diella” has been tasked with combating corruption in public contracting. While the appointment has been hotly debated, there’s been very little transparency around what exactly the system is presenting and what data it is analyzing, as we highlighted in an interview with TIME’s Tharin Pillay. Local experts shed more light on Diella’s backstory in this in-depth conversation hosted by Meghna Chakrabarti for Boston’s WBUR On Point program.
In the Democratic Republic of Congo, a company that obtained $70 million in subcontracts on a major infrastructure project allegedly included a minister among its shareholders, according to The Platform to Protect Whistleblowers in Africa (PPLAAF) and its partners. The Kinshasa-Matadi highway was financed through a public-private partnership that may have allowed for subcontractors to be chosen with minimal government oversight, potentially increasing corruption risks.
After raising questions about a small town mayor’s involvement in public contracts in Serbia, the independent media outlet FAR reportedly became the target of a high-level harassment and cyber-surveillance campaign. FAR’s journalists teamed up with Forbidden Stories’ Alexander Abdelilah to continue the investigation, finding links between Dimitrovgrad’s top official and a company that won two dozen no-bid tenders, earned profits totalling €6 million (US$7 million) from public contracts since 2021, according to procurement records (via the excellent newsletter Europe Uncovered by Follow the Money).
Documentary: This newsletter emerged during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, including all of its eye-watering procurement boondoggles. So we would be amiss not to mention this excellent new ITV documentary (sign-in required), featuring OCP’s own Gavin Hayman. It digs ever deeper into the waste and mismanagement in the UK during the health crisis; particularly via the “VIP lane,” a list of preferred vendors that ended up delivering sub-standard yet overpriced products.
[Data insights]
France: Long-term open data wrangler and friend Colin Maudry has done some hard work to make France’s data more accessible: one dataset, 1.3 million contract awards – cleaned, documented, and updated daily. You can access and download the data in several tabular formats at https://decp.info, and read his notes here.
Defense spending: Germany’s ZDF examines who benefits from the country’s massive €100bn (US$116bn) investment in defence and security. Christian Schweppe summarizes what they found, including which company received nearly half of the funding, who the other contractors and subcontractors are, and what has actually been delivered so far. Watch the full video of the investigation.
Defense budgets are one of the few areas of public spending set to increase substantially in the coming years. But what does that actually look like on the ground in Nordic countries? A White Paper by Nordic Procurement Labs provides data-driven insights into €27.5bn (US$32bn) worth of defense contracts between 2015-2025. More than 27% of that sum was spent in 2024 alone (€7.5bn or around US$8.7bn). Check out the interactive dashboard too.
Colombia: Mining and oil companies make a pact: in exchange for the right to engage in extractive activities that can lead to pollution and biodiversity loss, they pay royalties to fund public projects that benefit communities. That’s the theory anyway, explain El Espectador’s David Riaño Valencia and Laura Salomón Prieto. Their investigation tracks what really happens in royalty-funded infrastructure projects in Colombia. Check out the infrastructure map that links the projects to the procurement data, an article highlighting which projects are currently active, and a video explainer on royalties and their risks.
A new report by the End Snow-Washing campaign examines compliance with requirements to publish information on beneficial owners in licensing, permitting, and procurement in Canada. Run by TI Canada and Canadians for Tax Fairness, the research explores requests for proposals (RFPs) in over 100 provinces and territories. Just 59% required the full names of beneficial owners to be published and only one in three required their country of residence, the report found. Compliance was even lower at the municipal level. While 100% of federal RFPs required naming the legal owner, only two-thirds asked for the country of residence.
[Data tools & resources]
Brazil‘s public procurement data now speaks the same (data) language as the rest of the world! All information on tenders and awards conducted through the country’s compras.gov.br system is available in a structured, open, and internationally comparable format. What’s more, a single access point can be used to obtain all the details of a procurement process, using a unique identifier. That means no more searching across multiple systems. The publication also includes data to identify sustainability policies and small business participation. Access it via our Data Registry and review the publication policy.
Investigating public contracts falls squarely under transparency and governance. The Pulitzer Center has reporting grants for freelancers and staff journalists worldwide you can apply for here.
Finally, will you be at the Global Investigative Journalism Conference in Malaysia? Meet me there: I’ll share some of our tips and tricks in a session on unlocking investigations into government procurement or get in touch for a tea or coffee.
This newsletter has been put together by Georg Neumann at Open Contracting Partnership with editing by Sophie Brown. Thanks for reading. Do give us a like if you’ve enjoyed the read. Did a friend forward you this email?