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‘Tender Board has the power to terminate ‘Critic’ contract’ – Jagdeo
Kaieteur News – The National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB), has the authority to terminate $865M Belle Vue, West Bank Demerara (WCD) pump station contract which was awarded to Tepui, a construction company that the Guyanese Critic (Mikhail Rodrigues) is closely linked to.
At least this is what Vice-President, Bharrat Jagdeo said on Thursday at his weekly press conference after he was asked if his Cabinet has the power to terminate contracts once irregularities are found. Kaieteur News asked the VP if his Cabinet will be looking to terminate contracts like the one awarded to Rodrigues. Jagdeo in his response said that his Cabinet has no part to play in the awarding or approving of contracts. “Tender Board approves contracts…” the VP responded, before adding later on in his lengthy explanation “We took the Cabinet out of awarding contract. So Cabinet doesn’t award contract, I already explained that Cabinet offers a no-objection, the award is done at NPTAB.”
Jagdeo said too that his government has multiple layers of protection when it comes to the awarding of contracts. “If you feel aggrieved, the PPC (Public Procurement Commission) is an oversight body, a constitutional oversight body so there are several layers that we put in place- the PPP government put in place that wasn’t there”.
He added that if persons aren’t satisfied with the PPC’s findings or recommendations after investigating the awarding of a contract then they can also head to the courts. “So if people feel that the PPC doesn’t give them what they want although it’s a constitutional body. They still have recourse to go to our courts that was never withdrawn from people,” Jagdeo told reporters.
With regard to the Pump Station Contract awarded to Rodrigues, Jagdeo at a press conference last week Thursday had said that although multiple irregularities were found by the PPC and recommendations were made, terminating the contract was not one of them.
The contract handed to Tepui was the subject of an investigation by PPC over the past six months. The investigation revealed that Tepui had failed miserably during the evaluation process for bids at the level of the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB), but it was still handed a $865 million contract to build a pump station at Belle Vue, West Bank Demerara (WBD).
In its report, the PPC highlighted several procurement breaches committed by TEPUI and overlooked by NPTAB in awarding the contract. According to the document which was perused by Kaieteur News, NPTAB ignored several key details when it came to the company satisfying the evaluation criteria for the award of the $865million deal.
Jagdeo had reportedly shifted blame to the evaluation team for the procurement breaches found in the handing out of a $865M pump station contract to Tepui. .
On Thursday when he was asked about what his government intends to mitigate such irregularities when it comes to awarding contract, he said, “You should direct that [question] to the Ministry of Finance and the Tender Board but clearly we have to ensure that there is no arbitrariness in the application of the evaluation criteria.”
He noted however that evaluation criteria must be crafted in a manner “that would allow you to stick rigidly with it.” “You know that the market don’t have enough bidders, so you are going out for 17 contacts. You can’t give all 17 to one or two persons with the experience”, Jagdeo said in making his case for crafting a set of flexible evaluation criteria.
“Now I have seen this thing about, oh because they don’t have prior experience, I have seen contractors that have a long track record with prior experience and their projects are now delayed too…often it is not about the contractors who have the capacity. Many of the contractors who have the full capacity, the “so called capacity”, they have so much work to do that even the contracts they have now, they are not fulfilling on time”, Jagdeo added.
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