Why was the latest bidding round selective?

May 19, 2023 Features / Columnists, Peeping Tom

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Kaieteur News – Information has to come to hand that three members of the People’s Progressive Party are likely to soon undertake a protest walk, patterned after that undertaken recently by Ray Daggers. The walk which will most probably follow the same route as the one taken by Daggers is unrelated to the oil and gas sector.

The three members will be protesting the PPP/C’s non-holding of its Congress, due since 2019 and for which no date has been set. It is also aimed at calling on the highest decision-making body of the party to remove one of the most powerful figures in the party and the government. If and when this walk gets going, it is likely to get a lot of public attention. But that will only deflect from some of the more important issues facing the country.

Guyanese cannot afford distractions at this time because that is the opportunity which forces aligned to the government want to seize public assets. Just recently, there was the distraction of an appeal of a decision of a judge who had made certain Orders to the Environmental Protection Agency. While Guyanese were preoccupied with this decision, the government has announced that it has received two bids in the rebidding for the Marriott Hotel. The hotel is now likely to be sold to either one of these two bidders and this has happened because Guyanese were so distracted by the appeal case that they did not keep the pressure up on the government to not sell the now profitable Marriott Hotel.

The government has acted unethically in relation to the privatisation of the hotel. First, it invited expressions of interest for the hotel and a number of firms submitted bids. Lo and behold, at a press conference, the Second Vice President, announced that that process was merely intended to test the market and that none of the bids were satisfactory to the government. It was highly unethical and unprofessional for the government to have invited bids in order, as it claims, to test the market. Bidders would have gone to great trouble and expense to put in their bids and for them to be told that the government was merely assessing the market was unprincipled.

The government was never under any obligation to accept any of the offers made. It could have rejected all. But it just shows its temerity in admitting that it just used the bidding process to test the market. By this admission, the government was conceding that the initial invitation for expressions of interest was not really bidding round. Having then set a base price for the hotel, the government apparently went back to the same bidders and invited them to submit new bids. Since this was the first legitimate bidding round–the first one being used to merely test the market–it amounts to selective bidding for the government to ask for bids only from those who had participated in the ‘market-testing’ process.

Only two bidders submitted bids. One of the most expensive public assets is about to be disposed and there was no open bidding for this particular round. This too is unethical. If the first time was merely to test the market, this time around, the bids should have not been restricted to those who had previously participated. The government acted within the law. There is no Privatization Law. The Procurement Act covers public procurement not privatization. Even though 30 years ago, a Privatization Policy Framework was developed, and even though that Policy was intended to cover the privatization of all state-owned commercial enterprises, the present PPP/C government has long abandoned that as a guide for privatization.

That Policy Framework Paper required that all enterprises for sale would be widely advertised so that the process and criteria for pre-qualification of bidders (where appropriate) are made public prior to the sale. The Paper also recommended competitive bidding and proposed that in pursuit of competitive bidding that adequate publicity and notification be given so as to attract the greatest number of interested parties.

The Policy Framework Paper had also required  if the Bid prices received are lower than the floor price as fixed by the Government, the Government may choose to conduct the disposition of its interest through negotiation. The Paper states that in this instance the government would appoint a special ad-hoc committee to conduct the negotiations with interested parties on a one-on-one basis, or as a group. The bidding is done and the profitable Marriott Hotel is now up on the market. The government will most likely proceed with the sale. But at least, the public should have a peaceful demonstration to demand that there be a clause in the sale contract prohibiting the hotel being flipped within the first 15 years of the sale.

(The views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and beliefs of this newspaper and its affiliates.)

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• Congress, Environmental Protection Agency, Peeping Tom, People's Progressive Party, Ray Daggers

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