The Trading Corporation of Pakistan (TCP) is again likely to get poor response for wheat import due to short period between submission of pre-qualification applications and wheat tender date, sources said.
TCP tender is drawing interest from leading suppliers of wheat but due to bureaucratic and disorganised approach they have not yet been able to participate in the bidding, they said. The TCP published a pre-qualification notice in newspapers on October 13,, 2007, during Eid holidays. Surprisingly, it also issued yet another tender for 50,000 tons on October 12 as well.
Sources said that the deadline for pre-qualification is the October 24, whereas the tender date is October 29. The concern of suppliers seems to be short time between pre-qualification and tender deadline, as TCP officials would scrutinise these applications and issue pre-qualification letters not before the October 25-26, which would be too late for them to submit any potentially competitive and cheap bids for the tender by Monday, October 29, 2007.
Those who are submitting pre-qualification documents are of the opinion that TCP should either pre-qualify them in due time or extend the tender submission date to provide fair and level playing field for all suppliers. Otherwise, they say, TCP may yet again pay much higher prices in this tender as well due to poor response to the tenders. In this way its transparency will continue to be questioned.