The charity said it has written to the National Audit Office, the Public Accounts Committee and Chancellor Rachel Reeves with a detailed overview of the findings and the contracts involved.
Chief executive Daniel Bruce said: “That we find multiple red flags in more than £15bn of contacts, amounting to a third of all such spending, points to more than coincidence or incompetence.”
He added that “the Covid procurement response was marked by various points of systemic weakness and political choices that allowed cronyism to thrive, all enabled by woefully inadequate public transparency.
“As far as we can ascertain, no other country used a system like the UK’s VIP lane in their Covid response.
“The cost to the public purse has already become increasingly clear with huge sums lost to unusable PPE from ill-qualified suppliers,” Mr Bruce continued. “We strongly urge the Covid-19 inquiries and planned Covid corruption commissioner to ensure full accountability and for the new government to swiftly implement lessons learned.”
Of a total of £48.1bn of public money spent on private sector contracts related to the Covid-19 pandemic, £14.9bn was written off by the Department of Health & Social Care.
Of that, approximately £1bn was spent on PPE that was deemed unfit for use, according to another NGO, Spotlight on Corruption.
A National Audit Office inquiry into public procurement during the pandemic, published in November 2020, external, found no evidence of ministerial involvement in procurement decisions or contract management.
