Thread by @allthecitizens

THE ONE PERCENT - BREAKING

Since March 2020, @allthecitizens has found at least £21bn has been spent by the UK government in their pandemic response.

£5.3bn of this (25%) went to just 1% (10) of the 990 companies that won contracts.

THREAD.

The highest value of contracts, over £777bn, went to the logistics and trade management provider Uniserve. It’s founder, Iain Liddell (below centre) advised a pro-Brexit thinktank chaired by 2 Tory ministers. It’s largest contract win was for almost half a billion pounds.

The next was Unispace Global Ltd, an interior design company, which won almost £680m. Unispace is linked to the Plymouth Brethren, a religious group also tied to major contract awards. One of Unispace’s directors is the son of the Church’s leader.

https://twitter.com/allthecitizens/status/1329069371709222913?s=20

Yangchen New Cloud, a medical equipment supply company, won over £600m in 4 contracts. The Chinese company’s Covid contracts have doubled in value since July 2020, when last reported by the National Audit Office.

Innova Medical Group won almost £600m in 2 major contracts for test kits, including the biggest single contract during the pandemic. Concern has been raised over the efficacy of the tests; studies show they may miss up to 50% of Covid-19+ infections. bbc.co.uk/news/uk-551982…

Next is Life Technologies Ltd, awarded 15 contracts totalling some £480m. We found the Chinese company also sells equipment allegedly “used for genetic testing” of Uyghur Muslims, as reported here with @BylineTimes.
bylinetimes.com/2020/11/25/cov…

Randox Laboratories won almost £480m in contracts. Tory government minister Owen Paterson is a paid consultant (£500 an hour) for the company, which has also bought him and his wife two £240 dinners, and accommodation for the Randox Polo event. theguardian.com/world/2020/may…

Primerdesign won £470m. The company saw its share price grow by 3000% after it won a contract to provide 288,000 Covid-19 tests per week to DHSC. Primerdesign works with Europa Logistics, a company run by Andrew Baxter, a personal donor to Boris Johnson. uk.news.yahoo.com/coronavirus-no…

IQVIA Ltd, a clinical research company, won £459m. The British Medical Journal raised concerns in 2020 over the transparency of the ACCORD group, that includes IQVIA, “acting as a conduit for political direction of clinical research”.
bmj.com/bmj/section-pd…

Crisp Websites, a trading name of Pestfix, a pest control supply firm, won £457m. The company reportedly provided 600,000 facemasks that could not be used for their original purpose. They had no previous experience of providing PPE.
nytimes.com/interactive/20…

Spire Healthcare Ltd, which runs 39 private hospitals across the country, won £356m in contracts. The company was fined £1.2m last year for “illegal price fixing” gov.uk/government/new…

Our calculations don’t include framework contracts that do not state specific amounts awarded to individual companies, such as this one. Over £702m has been awarded under framework agreements that do not specify how much each company received. ted.europa.eu/udl?uri=TED:NO…

Where amounts were given as a range, the minimum amount was used. The data, manually collected by @allthecitizens, was not provided by Tussell unlike other media outlets. Tussell recently won a contract for £29k to “investigate UK procurement activity”: contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/Notice/9d903a3…

Only 1 of the contracts above was won through public tender. The rest were either part of a framework agreement, directly awarded, or “fast-tracked”, an emergency measure implemented by the government, allowing awards to be made without public tender.

Only 3 of the contracts were published within the 30 days that the government is legally obligated to publish. Matt Hancock’s department was found to have acted “unlawfully” over Covid contract publishing this week.
bbc.co.uk/news/uk-561254…

According to the National Audit Office in December 2020, over half of awards awarded in the first 7 months of the pandemic have yet to be made public. Winning large amounts of money in Covid contracts does not indicate illegal activity or wrongdoing.

[correction] - in reference to Uniserve, the figure '£777bn' - should have read £777m.