The Supreme Court Monday sought by April 23 the details of Jamshoro Joint Venture Ltd (JJVL) pertaining to changes in the bidding documents of JJVL LPG quota and its final implementation agreement. A larger bench of Justice Nasirul Mulk with Justice Jawwad S Khawaja, Justice Gulzar Ahmed, Justice Iqbal Hameedur Rahman and Justice Musheer Alam resumed the hearing on maintainability of identical review petitions in the JJVL LPG quota case.
The counsel, Khawaja A Tariq Rahim for JJVL and Mohammad Azhar Siddique for Home Gas Pvt Limited advanced their arguments over the apex court'' jurisdiction under the Article 184 (3) for the maintainability of the constitutional petition filed by Khawaja Asif in the instant matter.
They argued that in view of the acquisition clause of the agreement in the instant matter both the parties have certain obligations, adding that the JJVL had never asked for the deletion of clause 18 of the agreement. The counsel further said that the SSGCL was not promising the guarantee of expected gas, saying the JJVL by making a risk entered into the extraction on Build and Operate basis as JJVL has to invest more than $100 million in the project.
They informed the bench that LPG got wasted from 1987 till 2003 which caused a loss of $200 million to the national kitty, saying an attempt was made by the government but nobody was interested in the plant because of low extraction of LPG from Badin gas field. The counsel apprised the bench that implementation agreement was executed between SSGC and JJVL till February 3, 2011 on August 12, 2003.
The counsel contended that February 3,2011 was the expiry date of Gas Sales Agreement (GSA) between British Petroleum and SSGC, adding that the GSA was extended in the favour of British Petroleum by SSGC due to various reasons because SSGC failed to guarantee the gas extraction agreement. They tried to convince the court that in view of such extensions the implementation agreement of the JJVL was automatically extended till the validity of GSA.
They contended that no material change was made in the agreement saying through negotiations, clarifications and by making such amendments the SSGC has taken an advantage of Rs 22 billion from JJVL. Responding to an observation of Justice Jawwad S Khawaja that there was a single bid for the LPG extraction, the counsel said that as many as nine parties took part in the bidding whereas only six had obtained the bid documents from the SSGC and only JJVL had submitted a bid with the delay of one day due to the 9/11 happening in the US.
The counsel told the court that the Board of the SSCG condoned the delay, saying even otherwise a technical proposal was not opened until or unless a bid was on record. The court remarked there are so many changes in the bidding documents along with final implementation agreement and sought details of such amendments from the JJVL counsel. Later, the hearing of this matter was adjourned till April 23.
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