Corruption and Public Procurement in Health Sector: The Challenges of Pandemic Era in Greece

Abstract

The health sector in Greece is considered as one of the most vulnerable sectors with high levels of corruption and appears to be particularly problematic in the provision of health services and in medical supplies procurement processes carried out by public hospitals. Viewed from a systemic-structural perspective, corruption is examined as a phenomenon emerging from the interactions and interconnections between the organized structures of venture capital and the state apparatus. This paper argues that the COVID-19 crisis has produced a breeding ground for potential corruption practices and seem to intensify the unlawful practices especially in procurement processes. The state of exception and the implementation of emergency measures manufacture the conditions that permit the lack of transparency in the transactions between the health care system and the pharmaceutical industry. Applying an integrated theoretical model of state-corporate crime and critical health criminology and drawing on empirical qualitative research, this paper highlights the procurement corruption risks in the health sector during the pandemic era.

Anticorruption Markets: Law, Public Procurement, and the Colonial Regime of Permission in Puerto Rico

“…This anticorruption market operates as an additional instantiation of a colonial regime of permission enabled by a contrived legal and political history of US colonial domination. This conceptualization contributes to the scholarship on crimes of the powerful, enriching the analysis of the interconnection between state-corporate crime, corruption, and anticorruption (Stamouli et al, 2023a, 2023b), portraying corruption not merely as a disruption in normal state-corporate relations, but as a constitutive dimension of the colonial relationship.…”

“…Similarly, the public procurement scholarship has systemically emphasized that contracting services constitute the instance in which corruption is most likely to occur (David-Barrett & Fazekas, 2020; Hudon & Garzon, 2016; Stamouli et al, 2023b). This understanding obscures the fact that procurement constitutes an instance of the state subsidizing or transferring funds to corporations.…”