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> It appears what happened is, during the height of the crisis, a bunch of amoral City spivs thought it was appropriate to speculate on PPE. No, the story isn'

> It appears what happened is, during the height of the crisis, a bunch of amoral City spivs thought it was appropriate to speculate on PPE. No, the story isn't that someone decided to speculate. The story is how someone who's a speculator got such a contract. In fact, he says this explicitely > The normal public procurement tendering process has pre-qualification criteria which companies have to meet. These will normally include so many years of experience in the specific sector, employment of suitably qualified staff, possession of the required physical infrastructure and a measure of financial stability. This is perhaps obvious – otherwise you or I could simply stick in a bid to build the HS2 railway that is £10 billion cheaper than anybody else, win the contract then go and look for a builder.

JoeSmithson 6y ago
Yes but that was dropped across the board, it was nothing in particular to do with this firm which is just one of many that sought to profit from the chaos. The government lifted the normal tending process in a panic, and numerous dodgy financial firms starting buying PPE to make money.
- doublesCs 6y ago
  > Yes but that was dropped across the board, it was nothing in particular to do with this firm which is just one of many that sought to profit from the chaos. Again, the story isn't that they sought to profit from chaos, it's that they got the contract. Can we focus on that? Instead of saying "they were trying to profit", can we start from "of course they were trying to profit, but why wasn't the tender made public, and who made the decision to give it to them?"
  - JoeSmithson 6y ago
    The CM article doesn't answer your questions at all and instead for some reason digs around in the public accounts of this company. Why? The FT article goes into much more detail about the actual procurement process and the surroundings issues. > ”Around 16,000 potential suppliers contacted a 500-person buying team set up by the Cabinet Office in March to offer to supply kit for hospital staff." This is because one of them is actual journalism and one of them is a biased write-up of pointless open source research.

JoeSmithson 6y ago

Yes but that was dropped across the board, it was nothing in particular to do with this firm which is just one of many that sought to profit from the chaos. The government lifted the normal tending process in a panic, and numerous dodgy financial firms starting buying PPE to make money.

doublesCs 6y ago
> Yes but that was dropped across the board, it was nothing in particular to do with this firm which is just one of many that sought to profit from the chaos. Again, the story isn't that they sought to profit from chaos, it's that they got the contract. Can we focus on that? Instead of saying "they were trying to profit", can we start from "of course they were trying to profit, but why wasn't the tender made public, and who made the decision to give it to them?"
- JoeSmithson 6y ago
  The CM article doesn't answer your questions at all and instead for some reason digs around in the public accounts of this company. Why? The FT article goes into much more detail about the actual procurement process and the surroundings issues. > ”Around 16,000 potential suppliers contacted a 500-person buying team set up by the Cabinet Office in March to offer to supply kit for hospital staff." This is because one of them is actual journalism and one of them is a biased write-up of pointless open source research.