Contracts, Data and Investigations: Edition 2020-12-04
This week: Managing PPE stockpiles, personal connections, the money pipeline, and a new platform in Paraguay
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.
Stockpiles: As we continue to track purchases and preparations for vaccine distribution, there are some questions about what’s been happening with all the PPE that has been bought. Reuters’ Tom Bergin finds that theUS has spent billions on ventilators that may not save critical patients. In the UK, a PPE stockpile has been stuck at a port since summer and maybe costing the government £1m a day, reports Ian Sale for Sky News. And Germany has not been keeping up their part of the deal, as businesses are stuck on PPE ordered by the government, writes Ansgar Graw for the Focus.
Third time’s the charm: Ion Preasca for Rise Moldova investigates the challenges for the purchase of several hundred thousand protective suits over the course of three auctions.
Slow, but steady? The investigations into Kenya’s US$70 million scandal at the Kenya Medical Supplies Agency are advancing slowly as they have to look at the full procurement cycle and the involvement of international suppliers. Moses Odhiambo provides an update for The Star.
Whatsapp and phone calls: personal connections matter. In the UK, Felicity Lawrence reports how the company of the health secretary’s neighbor won a contract for vials without prior experience of producing medical supplies, starting with a Whatsapp message. In Germany, a company received a phone call from the minister-president of North Rhine-Westphalia to produce masks after it had contacted the minister president’s son, write Kristian Frigelj and Anette Dowideit for the Welt. Meanwhile, Germany’s company register is delayed because of the pandemic, Katharina Kutsche reports for Süddeutsche Zeitung.
Money pipeline: A new investigation by Financial Times’ Tom Burgis, based on leaked documents, appears to implicate billionaire and Kazakh’s president son-in-law in diverting tens of millions of dollars from big state contracts in a secret scheme to profit off the central Asia pipeline megaproject.
A new guide by the Natural Resource Governance Institute is designed to help journalists investigate the extractives sector, including the ins and outs of oil, gas, and mining contracts.
Paraguay has a new platform called Control Ciudadano that helps citizens and journalists explore public contracts using open data and analysis driven by artificial intelligence. It links public contract data with asset declarations and company ownership information, among others. The project is an initiative by International IDEA, as well as reAcción, Centro de Desarrollo Sostenible, and Semillas para la Democracia. (The project also received support from us.)
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.
Did a friend forward you this email? Click here to subscribe.