-defends award of GDF contract to Kares
Vice President Bharrat Jagdeo yesterday stated that the strengthening of the procurement system will be continuing in the form of a countrywide prequalifying system allowing the Cabinet to have a full picture about companies bidding for projects.
Homing in on the procurement process at his weekly press conference yesterday following an editorial in Monday’s Stabroek News which said in part that “Yet again, the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB) has been found flagrantly violating guidelines for the award of contracts”, Jagdeo said, thousands of contracts are being carried out around the country in the various sectors due to the transformation that is currently ongoing countrywide.
However, he said, that these contracts when completed on time to the benefit of citizens are never focused on instead there seems to be a bias now to focus on a few contracts “the few that may have some issue and make that seem as the prevailing condition.”
This, he said, was something his party faced in the 2015 period as well “when they tried to characterize the People’s Progressive Party as being corrupt and so they are at it again.”
Noting the contents of the Stabroek News editorial, Jagdeo said that he had never seen such a strong position under APNU+AFC’s five years “when there was practically no public tender, when ministers were directly involved in their ministries in giving themselves contracts, there were no public tenders, there was no document to evaluate, there was no evaluation, there was no paper trail so you can’t investigate anything.”
However, he pointed out that for the contracts being highlighted now there is a paper trail, process, and documents to support “every single one of them.”
Notwithstanding this, Jagdeo said that the last thing he would do is put his “neck on the block for evaluators or the probity of every contract in this country”, stressing that “we remain open to ensuring that the process grows in terms of transparency and that we can weed out people who are engaged in corrupt practices.”
According to him, this was done on “several occasions” where they have seen the growth of the system.
Stabroek News’ editorial had noted that one of the tender board’s evaluation committees was found to have awarded a $2.1b Guyana Defence Force (GDF) project to Kares Engineering Inc over a better bidder.
NPTAB
Facing criticism over the award of the GDF project to Kares Inc, the NPTAB yesterday said that the evaluation criterion at the centre of the dispute had been “discontinued years ago” although nobody seemed to have been aware of this.
In recent months, the NPTAB and its evaluation committees have come under close scrutiny over a series of irregular practices which raised concerns about corruption.
After a complaint by Correia and Correia, the Public Procurement Commission (PPC) investigated the natter and found that the award to Kares Inc did not indeed go to the lowest responsive bidder. It also said that the evaluation committee was bound to follow the structure that no bidder below 80% of the engineer’s estimate should be deemed responsive. Despite this, Kares was deemed the winner though the bids of Correia and Correia and S Jagmohan were better.
NPTAB in its statement yesterday said that it had noted the Stabroek News report `GDF $2.1b wharf contract improperly awarded to Kares” dated June 23rd, 2024.
It said that “The Guyana Defence Force advertised for the construction of a Coast Guard reinforced concrete wharf at Ruimveldt and bids were received via public tendering in November 2023. Subsequently bids were evaluated by an independent evaluation committee. The evaluators recommended the lowest responsive bidder and an award was made in December 2023. The contract award for the aforementioned project was published in January 2024 and the Government of Guyana entered into a contract in February 2024, with the bidder who submitted the lowest evaluated bid, which is also the lowest overall bid.”
According to the NPTAB , in March 2024, Correia & Correia Ltd submitted a request for review citing “Any bidder whose bid is less than 80 percent of the engineer’s estimate will be non-responsive”.
The NPTAB said, that it must be noted “that this Engineer’s Estimate was never published or given to the bidders prior to the opening of bids. It must be noted that the criteria cited was discontinued years ago and is not included in the numbered criteria in the approved Standard Bidding Document. Further, any modifications to the criteria in the Standard Bidding Document require prior approval from NPTAB in accordance with Section 23 (3) of the Procurement Act 2003. Additionally, please be advised that the complaint does not align with Section 52 of the Procurement Act 2003.”
It seems that NPTAB is the only party in the process who is aware that this 80% benchmark has been discontinued.
(Table of bids from the Department of Public Information)
In its statement, NPTAB reaffirmed its commitment to transparency, fairness and accountability. Maintaining public trust and upholding procurement integrity are of utmost importance and NPTAB remains dedicated to fulfillment of these responsibilities. Noting that newspapers have an “obligation not to be anecdotal”, Jagdeo yesterday said that after viewing Stabroek News editorial he sought clarification from the tender board.
“I thought we had given the contract in this case to a high bidder… First of all, there were eight bidders through an open public tender for this process, eight bidders.”
Based on the information from the NPTAB, Jagdeo pointed out that the highest bidder bid 126% above the engineer’s estimate, another was 116% above the engineer’s estimate, another 97% above the engineer’s estimate and another 12.47%. However, the fifth bidder bid 17% below the engineer’s estimate, the sixth bidder 18% below the estimate, the seventh bidder 21% below and the eight bidder which the project was awarded too bid 22% below the engineer’s estimate.
“So clearly Kares bid was the lowest of all of the eight bids, so we establish that they are the lowest bid so apparently Correia sent a letter to the PPC to say that in the bid document that there was a paragraph which says that any company that bid 20% below the engineer’s estimate and above will not get the contract.”
However, according to Jagdeo he questioned the tender board and said that if this was in the contract then the bids had to be evaluated in accordance with that criteria. “First of all the standard bidding document that should be used by every single government entity that was established by us in the past, there are nineteen criteria that you can use, we had discontinued when this was done years ago a percentage below the engineer’s estimate as disqualifying any bidder.”
Additionally, he said that the procurement act says that if “any time a ministry or a department or any one tries to change the standard bidding document they have to seek the approval of the national tender board and the reason why this is so is that every government agency can then start putting in their own criteria for evaluation of bids and then you have chaos in the system so everyone is supposed to use this standard bid document.”
Jagdeo stressed that this specific criterion is not a part of the standard bid document but was in the GDF’s request for proposals. It is unclear why the GDF would not have been aware of this.
He said that if this is allowed to go through then every government agency “can corruptly insert their own criteria for qualifying and disqualifying bidders away from the standard bid document” for their own preferences.
“So the NPTAB is within its rights to say you departed from the standard bid document.”
Additionally, Jagdeo pointed out that he was told that the engineer’s estimate was not published in the bid document “So how come you know that you are 20% or above the engineer’s estimate if it was not published in the bid document?”
Disciplinary approach
He asserted “So this is not corruption, first of all, a contract was awarded to the lowest bidder in a public tender, what we have is a departure from what is the standardized form of bidding, this is what we keep saying over and over again, many entities they do this on their own (thing) and sometimes it’s not picked up by Cabinet, when this goes to cabinet it will go (down) that the lowest bidder won this contract here.”
As such he said that is hoping that “the people who are looking into this would pay attention to all these matters, departure from standard bidding document and we now have to take a strong disciplinary approach to these agencies that do procurement out in the public domain that we depart from the standardized process, the standardized process was created for a purpose.”
Meanwhile, when questioned yesterday, Jagdeo stated that the government is “tightening up” as they also have a similar issue at the level of cabinet.
He explained, that when a document goes to the cabinet they would not see all of the work that companies have in the different agencies, as such they will be introducing a prequalification system “maybe starting from a threshold of $50m and above” so when contractors prequalify to do work for “half a billion dollars and you get one contract and you’re at $450m, when the cabinet paper goes there, it will say this contractor pre-qualify for half a billion dollars, already has a contract for $450m, therefore the cabinet will say immediately you can’t give another contractor for $200 or $300 million because they have reached their capacity.”
He stressed, that the government will be introducing this countrywide in the form of a prequalifying system “that will match capacity and then all of the agencies of the government will have to report to the centre or through a website about work that people have everywhere so that the cabinet, the government can have a full picture.”
