Contract Byline with airSlate SignNow

Contract byline

so look at this government contracts portal contracts for 1.8 million 7 million 7.5 million 161 thousand 4 million 7.3 million 7.6 million all released 80 18th of september and this happens every few days contracts dumped on the government portal and ready for us to sift so one of the biggest stories that we've been covering at byline times in recent months is what we're calling the ppe procurement scandal and this involves billions of pounds worth of government money being awarded to private sector companies for the supply of face masks and aprons and gloves to the front line of the nhs during the coronavirus crisis and while a lot of these contracts have gone to firms with an experience of delivering ppe quite a few of them haven't so some have gone to a dormant company and that hasn't traded for four years another has gone to a company that was only set up a month before it was awarded contracts it seems i was one of the few journalists who decided to sift through all the information on there cross-reference it with um companies house to see the background of these companies and why what what experience they really had did they have the experience to produce ppe during a pandemic a once in a hundred year event and found lots of companies that had good experience in healthcare but lots of companies that also didn't you can very easily decipher how much each company has been paid um and when i went on there i saw an absolute catalog of contracts the government has spent at least five billion on pp procurement deals um during the pandemic occasionally it shows um contract details so a basic tender agreement um between the government and the companies what it also emphasizes is the fact that none of these contracts or at least the vast majority went to competitive tender so these companies were given these deals without um anybody else competing for the contract which obviously leads to questions as to why they were selected why did the government choose these companies and quite a few of these deals have gone to backers of the conservative party so over 350 million pounds worth of deals have gone to people who have donated a conservative party who are actually conservative party politicians so there's a question as to cronyism um within the government and yet this conservative government has shelled out over the ma over a matter of months billions of pounds in pp procurement deals that it's then not willing to explain to the general population so there's an issue of transparency here so there was one company that has been awarded over 50 million pounds worth of ppe deals and it turns out that this company is actually dormant and so it was set up in may 2016 and it doesn't appear to have traded since it was set up it still has um roughly 100 000 pounds um value which is the amount of share capital that was awarded to the company when it first set up and even despite that it's been awarded huge deals and for the supply of ppe now the firm obviously and says that it supplied um the equipment the government wanted and the government's happy with what it did but there have there has to be questions about um why the government decided to award this huge contract to a dormant firm rather than anyone else is that not a risk of taxpayers money it might have worked out in this circumstance but in general you know what if it hadn't so this is important obviously because it's 5 billion pounds worth of public money of taxpayer cash that has been spent by the government on private sector contracts and now conservative governments conservative administrations people on the right of politics like to talk about um public spending and making sure tax the taxpayer gets value for money um and yet people have been suspiciously quiet about this government spending saying that anybody who questions it is a conspiracy theorist well five billion pounds worth of contracts that haven't been properly explained by the government is surely well within our rights to expose and the question is who's got this money why would they order the contracts were the contract successful and the fact is we don't know a great deal from this government about any of those questions you