Alexander Alfie
10/28/2020 6:26 PM
Clarín.com
Politics
Updated 10/28/2020 7:08 PM
The purchases made by the Government due to the coronavirus pandemic do not comply with transparency standards, since 85% were direct contracting, without bidding, and more than half concentrated in only eight companies.
In addition, many of the purchases made by the national state were not disseminated on any official platform, according to a report by Poder Ciudadano.
The Covid-19 Purchasing Observatory of Citizen Power surveyed
574 public contracts carried out by different areas of the Government, between March and September, for $ 14,125 million, of which 70% corresponds to the Ministry of Health and 15% to the Ministry of Social Development .
There he found that 66.2% of purchases were made by “exceptional direct contracting Covid” and another 19.2% by traditional direct contracting;
While
only 10.3% was made by public or private bidding
, among other mechanisms for the purchase of goods due to the coronavirus emergency.
"What you see is a lot of discretion to buy," said Germán Emanuele, director of Transparency and Fight against Corruption of Citizen Power.
And he added: "The emergency contracting system is being used a lot for purchases that have nothing to do with that," Emanuele told
Clarín
.
The fact is that at the top of the regulatory pyramid is public bidding, with greater control and transparency mechanisms.
There are fewer controls as you go down that pyramid, with traditional direct hiring.
And at the base of the pyramid is the exceptional purchase by Covid, where
there is no pre-award ruling and the official can contract with a single bidder
, said Poder Ciudadano.
In its report, the entity assured that "51% of the total amount is explained by the award to 8 companies", which were Tecme, Vialerg, Leistung Ingeniería, China Meheco, Propato, Tecnoimagen, China Sinopharm and Philips Medical System.
Consulted by
Clarín
, from the Ministry of Health, headed by Ginés González García, they reported that the response to the Citizen Power report would be made only by means of a note requesting access to public information.
Even when asked "why is it that most of the contracts are by direct award, without bids", the sources of Health insisted that they will only respond to the press when they present those concerns
in writing, through a note requesting access to public information.
When the Chief of Cabinet, Santiago Cafiero, presented this month in Congress, “he did not make an exhaustive analysis of the purchases made during the emergency and its special regime, but rather limited himself to expressing that such information is public and available to third parties, interested parties and the general public on the ComprAr portal and on the page of the National Contracting Office ”, stated the Citizen Power report.
However, according to its director Germán Emanuele
, “there are a lot of hires that are not seen and are not there.
For this reason, we are submitting requests for access to public information, so that they give us that data ”.
In fact, the Office of the Administrative Investigations Office filed a claim two months ago with the Access to Public Information Agency, because
more than 30% of the purchases made in the framework of the pandemic
"did not have any type of advertising";
that is to say, it was not published in any of the places mentioned by Cafiero, not even in the Official Gazette.
