Open Letter to EU Ambassador

Jul 23, 2016 Letters

Dear Editor;
With reference to the caption above, I wish to bring to your agencies’ attention a troubling development which involves the use of taxpayers’ monies within the European Union and those of the membership of the Inter-American Development Bank.
As you would recall, the Government of Guyana has secured a loan totaling USD 60 Million for the Guyana Power and Light. A portion of this money is from the EU.
As such, I wish to bring to your attention matters which I think would be of interest to you. At the opening of the tender for the bid for the GPL Transmission line project, several contractors submitted bids including 3 Chinese companies, 1 local company and 1 Colombian company. The latter two submitted prices which were below those of the Chinese companies and whose difference in price from that of the Chinese company amounts to just over one billion Guyana dollars.
This tender since its opening over 5 months ago has still not seen a bidder selected, although the evaluators have completed their work over 3 months ago. This is mainly because a few people are pushing for a particular company to be awarded the contract, even though they are not among one of the lowest bidders and the specifications they submitted do not meet that of the tender (this can easily be verified). It is for this reason, some of the persons who are in charge of the process are pushing for this particular company to be awarded the project and are in back and forth discussions with the IDB to accept their evaluation of this big company even though they failed both the price and technical specification.
These persons are also pushing the IDB to re-allocate funds within the loan to ensure that this particular company is awarded the project. These efforts run counter to a transparent process and are saturated with corruption only intended to make the Government of the day look bad. Should any of the companies wish to take this matter to the court I cannot see any-reason why they should not win the case and in the process stall a very important and needed project. It is also against procurement rules to shift or fiddle with any budget in order to justify awarding a contract to a high bidder after the tender would have been closed, I would have taught that the persons in the IDB looking at this project would have known that. It is important that the institutions giving monies uphold and safeguard transparency. It is the only way countries such as ours can develop.
I would like to urge the EU Ambassador to pay keen attention to this project and the use of his fellow countrymen tax dollars and also be the watchdog for transparency within our country. If we allow corruption to continue it will be a runaway train to the detriment of our people.
Observer

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