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9 Nov, 9 tweets, 4 min read
In 2020 Malaysian firm Supermax won a £311m contract to supply gloves to the NHS, despite previous allegations of human rights abuses and forced labour at its factories. Is British taxpayers’ money being used to fund modern slavery?
Read @samueljlovett's latest report on Supermax. Despite allegations of modern slavery, in July the UK govt placed an order with Supermax for 135m gloves costing £7.9m.
independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-n…
The Citizens are preparing to launch a joint legal case against the Department for Health alongside @WilsonsLondon which represents several workers in Malaysian glove factories who claim they have been exploited. wilsonllp.co.uk/the-citizens-n…
The Department for Health has signed a number of contracts with Supermax since 2015, including one in 2021 which has not yet been published on ContractsFinder. Image
In October 2021, the US Customs and Border Patrol banned glove imports from the Supermax Corporation and its subsidiaries after they identified 10 of the 11 International Labour Organization’s indicators of forced labour during their investigation.
reuters.com/world/us-bars-…
The UK Department for Health says that “Proper due diligence is carried out for all government contracts and our suppliers are required to follow the highest legal and ethical standards. If they fail to do so, they are removed from consideration for future contracts.” Image
Supermax’s glove contract is due for renewal. It could form part of a huge budget of £6bn to buy gloves for the NHS. Will UK authorities hand out more money to exploitative corporations, or will they stop rewarding suppliers who exploit migrant workers?
theguardian.com/world/2021/jul…
You can help us hold the government to account by supporting our crowdfunder. This case would be the first case to hold the government to account for failures in their own due diligence to address modern slavery.
crowdfunder.co.uk/scrutinise-gov…
Thank you to Alexei Sayle (get yourself on Twitter Alexei!), @lisemayer and @PopePower for their work on the film. Thank you all for your brilliant work.

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More from @allthecitizens

The Citizens Profile picture
25 Oct
🔴A damning report by @openDemocracy called #AccessDenied has revealed the ways in which the UK government has attacked the FOI Act.

"Secrecy is now a signature of Boris Johnson’s rule" the report says.

A 🧵on some of the findings of the report.

#AccessDenied report highlights how transparency in 2020 in terms of FOI disclosure rates by the govt has been the lowest ever. 1/8 Image
@openDemocracy report implicates the Cabinet Office of being even less transparent in comparison to other depts, pointing to how it blocked "requests from MPs about its use of public money to conduct political research" 2/8 Image
Read 10 tweets
The Citizens Profile picture
25 Oct
🚨NEW

FOIs are essential and they are under threat!

@openDemocracy has released its new report 'Access Denied' today which uncovers the govt's failure to comply to FOI requests, with the 2020 FOI disclosure rates "lowest...since records began in 2005".

opendemocracy.net/en/freedom-of-…
The news follows on from previous reporting by @openDemocracy, which revealed the existence of the 'Orwellian' Clearing House, a unit operating within the Cabinet Office accused of 'blacklisting' journalists:
Indeed, @allthecitizens have encountered numerous instances of the Cabinet Office and other departments refusing to answer FOI's.

As with our investigations into Palantir, where they took 145 days to respond, and only did so after a warning from the ICO:
Read 11 tweets
The Citizens Profile picture
23 Oct
We worked with @A__W______O to try to force govt to tell us why it had lifted mitigations in schools.

We spent weeks & weeks amplifying voices of scientists such as @dgurdasani1 warning of danger of this & calling for child vax.

You’ll never guess what happened next..
This wholly preventable surge in teenage cases has now spread to adults. Meanwhile, our booster roll-out has been sluggish. The result is a lot of risk for a lot of people, according to report in today’s @FT
Only half the people eligible for a third dose have come forward. One scientist on JCVI suggests to @ft it’s because people are ‘taking their cues from politicians’, believe the pandemic is over & ‘feel psychologically safe’
Read 4 tweets
The Citizens Profile picture
15 Oct
NEW: Today, news broke that Immensa, subsidiary of Dante, may have supplied 43,000 incorrect test results between 8th September and 12th October at their clinic in Wolverhampton. THREAD:
news.sky.com/story/covid-19…
As first reported in the @BylineTimes, Immensa were granted a £119m testing contract, without tender, when the firm had only been in existence for 4 months.

In total, Immensa won two Covid-related contracts, totalling over £169.4m:
NHS Test & Trace announced that they were suspending testing operations at the Immensa Wolverhampton clinic following the "vast majority" of results coming back as negative:
gov.uk/government/new…
Read 7 tweets
The Citizens Profile picture
14 Oct
🚨BREAKING: Private Covid testing company Dante Labs appears to have been using lax data privacy laws in order to advertise its genomic sequencing services to customers. THREAD:
Hundreds of companies have been making money from the huge private Covid-19 travel testing industry created by the UK government. Among these, some companies also offer DNA sequencing which offers ‘insights into your health, life and risk for hereditary disease’.
Dante Labs owns Immensa Health, which has been awarded £169,435,000 in two contracts for PCR testing of Covid-19 samples by the Department for Health and Social Care (DHSC).
contractsfinder.service.gov.uk/notice/b608182…
Read 16 tweets
The Citizens Profile picture
12 Oct
NEW: 🚨'Cabinet policy obliges ministers to delete WhatsApp messages'

Great report by @Haroon_Siddique in @guardian on our legal victory today & the shocking new evidence we revealed in court

With @Foxglovelegal

theguardian.com/politics/2021/…
What we were able to reveal to today is that it's actually Cabinet Office policy to insist ministers & advisors set their message apps to automatically delete.

The government is literally shredding its records in real time.
We would have *literally no idea* of this secret govt policy if we hadn't brought this case.

The Cabinet Office is an FOI black hole. The only reason we now know about this message deletion policy is because it was forced to reveal it in the course of this legal claim
Read 5 tweets

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