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BRAZILIA – The Health Ministry said it will cancel a contract to buy 10 million reagent kits used in Covid-19 tests. The announcement comes after GLOBO revealed that the Department of Integrity of the Ministry (Dinteg) pointed out possible irregularities in the purchase, made in August for R $ 133.2 million.
In a note, the ministry reported that, in addition to canceling the purchase process, it will also establish an “internal procedure to determine the responsibility of those involved.”
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The possible irregularity was transferred by the Directorate of Integrity to the Federal Court of Accounts (TCU), during the periodic inspection of the measures related to the pandemic. The purchase was listed by the court as one of the ten largest direct purchase contracts made by the portfolio in the context of the Covid-19 pandemic.
In the note, the Ministry of Health indicates that the Directorate of Integrity is “an advisory department in the minister’s office and has among its functions the identification of processes that may contain inconsistencies.” For this reason, the text explains, the agency “activated the control bodies” after “having identified irregularities in the process of acquiring kits for Covid-19 tests.”
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“The next steps include the cancellation of the purchase process and the establishment of an internal procedure to know the responsibility of those involved,” says the text.
In a report prepared by the TCU Secretariat for External Health Control, which endorsed the ruling passed last Wednesday in Court, the team reports “various changes in the specification of the object to be hired” throughout the purchase process.
The report also notes that a request for reconsideration submitted by the company, which came in second place in the emergency procurement process, claiming to target the winner, was ignored by the responsible sectors and kept out of the knowledge of other members of the portfolio.
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The contract under suspicion was signed on August 21, under the current administration of Minister Eduardo Pazuello. Until then, reports of misappropriation of public resources directed at Covid-19 by states and municipalities have been common, but not irregularities in purchases made by the Union, as is the case in question.
The winning company, Thermofisher Scientific Inc, represented in Brazil by Life Technologies Brasil Comércio e Indústria de Produtos para Biotecnologia Ltda, had to deliver a total of 10 million input kits for extraction of RNA (genetic material), of which 3 million in September, plus 3 million in October and 4 million in November. But, according to updated data until the first week of October, only 336 thousand articles had been delivered (3.3%).
