With municipal elections slated for next March, the nation is again heading into political season. It is known that during these times, political parties are “scratching around” for campaign finances for their campaign machineries.
If you listen to the PUP, the VIP, and COLA, however, the party in power, the UDP, doesn’t have to “scratch” around, because they have their hands in the public coffers, which is to say, taxpayers’ pockets.
This is a “clear attempt to enrich select UDP Ministers and cronies and pad [the party’s] election coffers.” –the Opposition PUP
Well, to mix our metaphors, the UDP just plucked out a PetroCaribe-sized gob of grease to get their election motors oiled and rolling. That’s the view of these parties after Prime Minister Dean Barrow’s administration issued an almost 8-million-dollar contract to a UDP crony for a project, which, according to a statement issued by the Government of Belize on Thursday, is for rehabilitation, and drainage infrastructure improvement of 1.9 km or about 1.1 miles of Fabers Road in Port Loyola constituency, of which Hon. Anthony “Boots” Martinez is the area representative.
The winner of the contract, Imer Hernandez of Imer Hernandez Development Co. Ltd., is the nephew of disgraced former UDP Deputy Leader and Deputy Prime Minister, Gaspar Vega.
In a statement issued today, the Opposition PUP referred to the contract as a “grossly bloated” one in which there is, “no rational justification” for such exorbitant costs. The release further states that the conventional rule of thumb for routine reconstruction roadways is one million dollars per mile.
According to the PUP, with municipal elections just months away, this is a “clear attempt to enrich select UDP Ministers and cronies and pad [the party’s] election coffers.”
The PUP revealed that in 2016, Cisco Construction was awarded a contract for the rehabilitation of 3.5 miles of the Philip Goldson Highway, which included widening the entire road by 10 feet and the placements of lights and the construction of a heavy-duty retaining wall to stop the erosion of the riverbank. The money spent under this contract amounted to less than four million dollars per mile [for the 3.5 miles rehabilitation project], said the PUP, who went on to say that “it is beyond comprehension that routine works on one mile of Fabers Road would be almost double that.”
The party took shots at Minister of Works Rene Montero, who, it says, has been scrutinized for bloated contracts before. The release pointed to a short stretch of road in Santa Elena, from the Loma Luz Boulevard to the Hawkesworth Bridge, which cost tax payers almost seven million dollars.
Five years after an audit revealed Cayman was “wasting millions of dollars” each year on the purchase of goods and services, the territory has rewritten its rules for public procurement in a bill that could come before the Legislative Assembly this month.
The Procurement Bill (2016) sets up an entirely new process for public bids for anything from purchasing supplies to the construction of public buildings, focusing on a tendering process at the “department level” – meaning a lower-level committee process will first review the proposals. Those committee reviews will then be passed on to a new entity called the Public Procurement Committee for a secondary review.
Although the local political leadership and Cayman’s deputy governor will have a hand in appointing members of the new Public Procurement Committee, the bill seeks to place layers between their direct involvement in public bids by having senior civil servants appoint members of the initial bid committee. The three-person “departmental” bid committee will review offers for any project and then pass its recommendations to the procurement committee, which will review it and either concur or disagree with the initial decision.
The issue of political control in the procurement process arose after former Auditor General Alastair Swarbrick noted in 2011 that certain elected officials appeared to be interfering in public tendering.
“We found evidence that some politicians are not complying with the procurement rules that have been established … and, in some cases, contravening the laws and regulations [of the bid process],” Mr. Swarbrick stated. “In other countries, the practice of politicians being involved in the administration of government’s transactions has resulted in cases of corruption and abuse.”
The government’s director of procurement, who has already been hired, will make rules to prevent the appointment of individuals on department committees who may have personal or financial conflicts on the projects they are overseeing, according to the legislation.
A code of conduct for procurement principles included in the bill states: “There shall be no corruption or collusion with suppliers or other persons involved in a procurement project.”
In addition, the government entity handling the project bids is forbidden from “splitting” the project to avoid minimum bid amount requirements set under the legislation, unless it can show there is a proper business case for doing so.
“[The government] entity shall not split or subdivide a contract to acquire goods, services or works in order to limit competition or to avoid requirements under this law,” the bill states.
Despite pronouncements that government breached the laws of Guyana to award a $605M drug contract to one of its corporate supporters, the Administration has once again sidelined the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB) to once again sole source in excess of half a billion dollars in drugs from Ansa McAl.
The leaked secret Cabinet document outlines that the sub-committee considered and approved the procurement of emergency pharmaceuticals to the tune of $515.2M.
The sole sourcing practice was vehemently railed against by the then opposition, now government, the coalition A Partnership for national Unity Alliance for Change (APNU/AFC).
Based on the contents of the document seen, the request to bypass NPTAB was submitted by the Minister of Finance, Winston Jordan and seeks to waive the competitive bidding and evaluation process in favour of sole sourcing the emergency supplies from Ansa McAl.
The award of the contract is reminiscent of a similar contract that was handed to Ansa McAl to the tune of $605M, for which the Public Procurement Commission had launched an investigation and had found that there were breaches of Guyana’s Procurement laws in order to facilitate the purchase.
Ansa McAl is the company that had built a multi-million-dollar Arch which was donated to the APNU/AFC Administration, subsequently erected on the East Coast Demerara (ECD) Highway.
…as Govt bypasses Tender Board to handpick ANSA McAL for $515M purchase
Despite pronouncements that Government breached the laws of Guyana to award a $605 million drug contract to one of its corporate supporters, the Administration has again sidelined the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB) to once again sole source in excess of half a billion dollars in drugs from ANSA McAL.
The leaked secret Cabinet document outlines that the sub-committee considered and approved the procurement of emergency pharmaceuticals to the tune of $515.2 million.
The sole sourcing practice was a strategy vehemently railed against by the then Opposition, now governing coalition A Partnership for National Unity/Alliance For Change (APNU/AFC).
The request to bypass NPTAB was submitted by Finance Minister Winston Jordan and seeks to waive the competitive bidding and evaluation process in favour of sole sourcing the emergency supplies from ANSA McAL.
The award of the contract is reminiscent of a similar contract that was handed to ANSA McAL to the tune of $605 million, for which the Public Procurement Commission had launched an investigation and had found that there were breaches of Guyana’s procurement laws in order to facilitate the purchase.
ANSA McAL is the company that had built a multimillion-dollar arch, which was donated to the APNU/AFC Administration and subsequently erected on the East Coast Demerara (ECD) Highway.
The request was approved on Monday last and bears the signature of the Minister of State, Joseph Harmon and the decision circulated to the Ministers of Finance and Public Health.
The National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB) was mum yesterday on the recent awarding of a US$154,154 contract to Trinidadian company, Western Scienti-fic, which was accused earlier this year of delivering expired or nearly expired drugs to the Ministry of Public Health.
At last week’s post-cabinet briefing, Minister of State Joseph Harmon announced that the company had secured a contract for the procurement of Sysmex reagents for the National AIDS Programme Secretariat.
The award of the contract to Western Scientific will raise further questions about the quality of the evaluation committees that are assessing the various bidders and whether the track record of the bidders is being taken into account. The NPTAB had said that it was going to widen the pool of evaluators. Concerns have been expressed in the past that evaluators are coming from the ministries and entities which are the procuring agencies and therefore the process can be contaminated…..
