The 74 Siemens contracts in Greece

Udgivet den 14/07/2011 af admin

There has been a lot of discussion about the contracts that German and French companies have made with the Greek government within the last year. Most recently Siemens was considered to be probed by Greek judges on one of their contracts with the Athens Metro. Unfortunately too little effort has been done so far from journalists to track the contracts through the EU procurement register, also known as the Information system for European public procurement – TED. The TED register contains data on awarded procurement contracts from all member states since at least 2007. Therefore the register should really be a gold mine for people who want to find out whether your local municipality conducted a legal and transparent biding process when they contracted X company to repair the pot holes.

Siemens bids on Greek contracts
Though the register is providing few details – in English – on the Greek contracts, we are however able to locate 74 contracts awarded to Siemens by Greek authorities under EU rules for noticing and awarding public procurement wihtin the period 2004 to July 2011. The first recorded awarding of a Siemens contract is 2006, while a number of contracts are undated. Unfortunately I have not been able to locate the allocated amount under the different contracts, however this might however be available in the original postings in Greek. If anyone out there is gifted with greek language skills, please take a look in the register and let us know if anything valuable shows up.

Below follows the list of the 74 contracts. It seem noticable that most of the Siemens contracts gained are within health care technology like X-ray. Anyways, here we go:

Explore the Ted register
If you want to explore the TED register your self this screen shot might help show the basic function.

Here is the quick guide:
1) Register your self as a user. This will enable you to browse the archive and not only the current tenders available for bidding
2) Search the company under “Full text”
3) Check the box “Statistics mode” in the right corner to enable some sort of spread sheet analysis of the contracts

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EU budget administered by the Commission mapped

Udgivet den 07/07/2011 af admin

The EU Commission offers an excellent quality data dumb of their yearly administrated budget from 2007 to 2010. I decided to toss the data into Fusion Tables to see how the dots would spill out on the map called Europe.

A few disclaimers on the data and the visualization:
- Fusion Tables has its flaws when geolocating: Please take into account that Fusion Tables is not always able to find the right spot. For instance the map tells that Europe Aid are running projects for IDPs in the Peach State (the great state of Georgia (US)). Cleaning up +100,000 rows was a little much, so this is what you get.
- Recipient size doesn’t display: The dots on the map doesn’t say the amounts received. For showing this some additional tweaking with a bit more cleaning i Google refine would be needed.
- Some recipients are left out: When Fusion Tables can’t locate the address, the data is left out. Unfortunately I don’t if a function in Fusion Tables allow you to see how many rows are left out.
- If you want to play more with the data here is the data dumb
- Also Openspending.org has displayed it neatly here

With those remarks in mind here is the Commission administrated budget of 2010:

Indeed the Benelux area seems to host quite a lot of activities and the same could really be said for the capitals of the rest of the member states. By the way, how come Belarus has so few activities, while countries like Sudan and other countries receive more from the Commission?

Hat tip to @ronpatz for the linking to the data.

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Member states fail to report credit risks to the EBA

Udgivet den 06/07/2011 af admin

The newly formed European Banking Authority currently has a full plate with the up coming stress tests on the European banks. However, one of the more elementary responsibilities is to receive information submitted by the financial regulators of the member states. The EBA refers to Article 144 of the Directive 2006/48/EC, which requires supervisors of member states to disclose data that allow meaningful comparison of supervisory rules and practices across the EU.

Unfortunately a number of member states have so far decided not to submit information about those requirements such as credit risks and regulatory actions for the years 2007 to 2009. The non-compliant countries include Sweden, Denmark and The Netherlands, who all have failed to report to the EBA on on their “national banking sectors” and “data related to credit risk”. Other countries like Poland and Hungary also seems to be partly failing to report to the EBA on some of those data. Interestingly enough Lichtenstein and Norway have provided better information than several member states.

The press staff of the EBA commented in an email on the questions of the lack of reporting from the countries mentioned above:

“The reporting for statistical data is expected to be reported annually. The countries that you have listed below have not submitted data despite requests to do so. Information on the Supervisory Disclosure Framework is a legal requirement and details have been provided to EBA members on how to do this in CEBS guidelines. Where information has not been submitted we can only inform you that the member is non compliant.”

It is surprising that financial regulatory agencies of the member states find it irrelevant to report about critical issues like credit risks and regulation. Below follows a list of member states, their approved state provided guarantees to their banks 2008-2010, just to show how banking guarantees have been utilized accross the member states:

Source: European Commission and Eurostat

Explore the reports from the financial regulators of the member states to the EBA here.

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Most civil society funding ends up in Brussels rather than CEE

Udgivet den 16/12/2010 af admin

Activists at climate meeting in Poznan, Poland 2008 Photo: net_efekt - CC / Flickr


During some research I came across this excellent paper from Mahoney and Beckstrand about where civil society funds from the EU end up. After some chat I ended up requesting the newest data at the EU Commission. Though the funds are only a limited mount of the total amount granted, it gives an idea of how the agency funding citizen action prioritize organizations. The data is published below and the final article was published in September 2009 in a Danish newsletter, Ugebrevet A4. Check it out.

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Why data stories

Udgivet den 31/10/2010 af admin

With the current developments across European countries an increasing amount of data is rapidly getting more accessible. Through Freedom of Information requests cross European journalism can be produced fast and more focused than before.

With a base in the Netherlands, but with a strong network across Northern Europe I research issues, access the relevant documents and produce basic the visualizations.

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