Lying, incompetent or duped?

It seems that  either the Welsh Government are Lying, incompetent or have been duped..

Wales Online report that.

Pharmaceutical giant Roche has flatly refuted a claim by Wales' First Minister Mark Drakeford in the Senedd that it had struck a deal to supply Wales with Covid-19 tests.During the plenary session on Wednesday, which was conducted on the Zoom live video-calling system, Mr Drakeford named the multi-national Swiss pharma firm and insisted Wales 'did have a deal' with them.Yet Roche issued a statement afterwards to "maintain Roche never had a contract or agreement with Wales to supply testing for Covid-19".The confusion emerged as Plaid continued to put pressure on Mr Drakeford and health minister Vaughan Gething over why Wales had not been able to obtain more testing capacity itself.The first testing lab in Wales will come on stream on Monday next week as part of a deal with Roche brokered by the UK Government and covering all four nations of the UK.Whitehall sources previously told Sky News that Whitehall had taken charge after a row between England and Wales over the tests.During the plenary session, Mr Drakeford said: ""So, we did have a deal; it was a deal that we had; it was with Roche. We believe that it was a deal that ought to have been honoured."A spokeswoman from Roche Diagnostics said: “We maintain that Roche never had a contract or agreement directly with Wales to supply testing for COVID-19."Our absolute priority and focus at this time is to support the UK Government and NHS to scale up testing across the whole of the UK, including in Wales."As part of the centralised roll-out of testing, we will continue to speak to colleagues at Public Health Wales to move this forward as quickly as possible."

Though it seems that the responsibility for overseeing the production and distribution of testing kits to Public Health England for the whole of the UK.

Plaid Cymru leader Adam Price told WalesOnline that the Welsh Government should publish the written agreement between themselves and the company.
He said: "As the Government and the company are at loggerheads ministers should now publish the written agreement and explain the circumstances in which the deal collapsed. Nothing short of full disclosure will resolve the issue which has already negatively impacted Wales’s ability to test at an increased rate."In a statement he added: "Transparency is crucial in any democracy – particularly during a time of crisis. We therefore welcome the First Minister’s admission today that it was indeed the company Roche who were behind the collapsed deal to supply five thousand additional Covid-19 tests per day to Wales.
“However, we still don’t know why the deal collapsed in the first place. It is in the public interest that the Welsh Government and Roche tell us what exactly happened to make the agreement fail.
“We were told that starting today we’d be conducting six thousand tests per day. But because the deal fell through, only 1,100 tests will now be done a day – a loss of 5,000 tests. That’s a scandal."Health Secretary Vaughan Gething had previously refused to name the company with whom the deal had collapsed.In a statement a Welsh Government spokesman said: “Our absolute focus is on increasing the number of tests to protect frontline key workers and the most vulnerable and stop the spread of the virus. All home nations are working at a UK level to share best practice, work up solutions and to validate new tests. Decisions on procurement will be informed by this process.”

The Welsh Labour Government have not come out of this well  even if emerged that they  had a deal and written contract with Roche, it appears that they are so powerless that there is probably be unable to do anything about it.

I doubt that such a deal with the Scottish Government  would have been broken, partly because Scotland has far more powers than Wales and above all a separate legal system.

Could it be that Roche , did not fully recognise that they were dealing with a legislature and not simply a part of the Westminster government.

Some might see this as an argument to abolish the Senedd, and let's face it iis a question we will need to answer.

But to me it shows that unless Wales get parity with Scotland , then we are going nowhere  when it comes to dealing with International firms, who seem to not fully recognise we exist.