An investigation made in partnership with OCCRP revealed that Portugal has bought at least 627 thousands of FFP masks that had fake or dubious certification.

This investigation was born when I was working in partnership with OCCRP analysing covid-19 public tenders. We found out that the European market was being flooded with tons of FPP masks that didn’t hold the right certification. In the center of these dubious certifications were two companies - ECM and ICR Polska - companies that were not allowed to certificate masks but kept issuing documents that seemed like proper certification.

At the national level, I’ve used the public tenders portal to identify all public organizations that had bought FFP masks and all companies that sold FFP masks to them. Then, I and the team working on this project reached contact with all of them asking for the certification of the masks provided.