The bidding of Gambat South EWT project by the Pakistan Petroleum Limited (PPL) has created a controversy, as one of the contenders has challenged the process by sending a legal notice followed by formal legal action during the ongoing week.
According to a legal notice available with Business Recorder, M/s SPEC Energy has dispatched a legal notice to the PPL against its strange disqualification for the award of tender proceedings.
Interestingly, the PPL has dubiously declined to explain the reasons behind disqualification and awarded the contract to one of the competitors hurriedly.
It may be noted that Rule 48 of the Public Procurement Rules says that no party can be condemned unheard after due evaluation in the award of any government contract.
In its grievance/complaint, M/s SPEC has pointed out that it has submitted detailed and comprehensive technical and financial bid along with bid bond in line with requirements of the tender, taking into account the pre-bid clarifications by making itself readily available to any query as may be required to support and facilitate the evaluation process during the post-bid clarification phase.
The legal notice has pointed out that the standard procurement procedure of evaluation and standard practice of all the procurement agencies of Oil & Gas, a bidder is asked to furnish their post bid responses if any area requires to be elaborated further to substantiate responsiveness or non-responsiveness of a bidder.
However, the technical evaluation report did not specify technical reasons for disqualification.
But instead of satisfying M/s SPEC grievances by constituting a committee and providing patience hearing, the PPL issued a letter dated 18 August 2014 and stated that due to non-compliance to item 1.1 (Section 1.0), which speaks about mandatory requirements of evaluation criteria, the PPL turned down request of M/s SPEC for formation of a committee. It was stated that M/s SPEC is an equipment packager and does not have experience of executing a complete project on Engineering, Procurement, Construction & Commissioning (EPCC) basis.
In response, M/s SPEC provided the PPL with a list of companies for which it has completed such projects and also produced completion certificates. Furthermore, a list of ongoing projects was also appended with the clarification.
Repeated attempts to hold a meeting and explain and clarify the situation were denied by the PPL and preferred to award the contract to another company bidding US $40 million higher than the cost quoted by SPEC.
It is also worth noting that the PPL has not returned the bid of SPEC until today and there are strong apprehensions that certain technical elements have been opened up before the opening of financial bid. Hurry in opening up the financial bid on 21 August 2014 has caused substantial loss to M/s SPEC in monetary terms besides irreparable loss in its reputation, added the legal notice.
The legal notice has termed it a discriminatory, unfair, prejudice and biased act showing inclination towards a specific bidder by the PPL, speaking volume about dreadful exercise of power. Neither solid cause has been shown by the PPL for disqualifying M/s SPEC nor was an opportunity provided to explain its position. It appears that the whole exercise has been made just to award the project to a favourite firm. It is against the public policy and a clear manifestation of discrimination and slackness and repeated requests to review its decision has been falling on deaf ear of the PPL.