U.K’s Covid contract to Cummings’ friends ruled as unlawful – Neil Swift discusses in Bloomberg
The U.K government suffered a setback after Judge Finola O’Farrell ruled that a 564,000 pound ($800,000) coronavirus contract was unlawfully awarded to a research firm whose owners were friends of Boris Johnson’s former chief adviser. This judgment comes as the government is currently in the midst of challenging a number of lawsuits which have been brought by public-interest group Good Law Project, accusing it of cronyism over how lucrative contracts were handed out during the pandemic. Neil Swift says that the U.K must finally take action to control the risk of public corruption. “The court made clear that they were not concerned with the suggestion of actual bias, but rather with the appearance of bias” but if “a public decision maker breached an expectation to act without bias and subsequently received a reward for doing so, they run the risk of committing a bribery offence.” Read more.