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Download PDF The Cabinet Purchase Committee yesterday rejected procurement proposals for two projects including a water treatment plant for Chittagong Wasa, and directed the authorities concerned to put out the contracts to re-tender due to irregularities in the previous bidding processes.
The purchase committee meeting chaired by Finance Minister M Saifur Rahman, however, approved 17 other projects, despite many of those being identified as irregular, sources said.
Members of the committee rejected a LGRD ministry proposal for awarding a Tk 64 crore contract to local DCL & Associates for setting up a water treatment plant for Chittagong Wasa, according to sources.
By analysing a review panel report, the committee detected gross irregularities in the tender, which had been set to go to DCL, quoting a suspiciously low price of Tk 64 crore, which is Tk 30 crore lower than the second and third lowest offers.
However, instead of acting on the review panel’s recommendation to award the contract to the second lowest bidder, the purchase committee yesterday asked for re-tender of the work due to a huge gap between the offers of the first two bidders.
Another project dealing with installation of digital telephone exchanges in upazila growth centres was rejected as the committee smelt a rat in the three and a half years old tender and decided to go for a fresh bidding.
Sources said the committee yesterday ‘hurriedly’ approved 17 other projects despite widespread allegations of corruption and irregularities in a number of those tenders.
A project for installations of high capacity optical fibre lines and synchronous digital hierarchy (SDH) transmission links connecting Dhaka-Bogra-Rajshahi-Nawabganj, and Moghbazar-Srinagar was approved yesterday. Bangladesh Telegraph and Telephone Board (BTTB) in its June 2005 bid selected a Chinese company, Huawei Technologies.
Huawei arranged foreign trips for members of the technical evaluation committee of the project during the tendering process violating Public Procurement Regulations.
Following formal objections from ZTE, an aggrieved bidder in the tender, that BTTB had blatantly favoured Huawei, a government review panel found that both the bidders had actually been unresponsive to the tender. The review panel in its decision in last July said, “re-tender should be called after making specifications more correctly and clearly. Penalty points should be shown against each item where applicable.”
Another telecoms deal was approved yesterday for supplying four units of Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) platforms to BTTB. But, the deal was found technically unresponsive by a review panel of the government earlier. Moreover, BTTB earlier agreed with the review panel recommendation for re-tender of the work. But, the ministry concerned did not inform the purchase committee about BTTB’s reservation about the project, a meeting source said.
The committee yesterday okayed a dozen land deals worth Tk 222 crore including a land development project at a hefty cost of Tk 104 crore for Jhilmil Residential Project.
Sources said three years ago, when the housing ministry floated tender for the project, it attached a condition that the bidder must own a dredger to qualify. The idea was to use the dredger to collect soil from the river near the project site for land filling.
Sources said the condition was imposed to facilitate awarding of the contract to a particular party as it is not any concern of the authorities how a contractor supplies soil to fill up low lying lands.
Two years back, a bidder was selected to do the job at the rate of Tk 107 for per cubic metre of land development. However, the bidder could not use the dredger.
Now the authorities lifted the condition of using a dredger and increased the cost of per cubic metre land filling to Tk 137 from Tk 107, increasing the project cost by Tk 24 crore.
The committee also approved import of 1,00,000 tons of fertiliser, procurement of 4,00,000 tons of fertiliser from Karnaphuli Fertiliser Company Ltd (Kafco), and an appointment of a supervising consultant for the Gulistan-Jatrabari flyover project.
The committee did not discuss the proposals for settlement of Tk 30 crore extra financial claims by the contractor of Pakshi Bridge, setting up the National Institute of Neuro-science at Sher-e-Bangla Nagar in Dhaka, and specialist services for operation and maintenance of Barapukuria coal fired power plant.
The proposal for procuring machine-readable passports (MRP), visas and national identity cards (NID), and Dapdapia Bridge construction project were not tabled in yesterday’s meeting.
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