The adjudication process for the award of a tender for the procurement of laptops and desktop computers for Parliament was flawed, the chief executive officer of the Procurement Regulatory Authority of Zimbabwe, Mr Clever Ruswa said yesterday.
He said this when he appeared before the Parliament’s Public Accounts Committee which is investigating circumstances around the botched deal for laptops and desktop computers which was cancelled by Government after Treasury refused to pay the inflated prices for their procurement.
The two companies that had won the tenders are Blinart Investments P/L, which wanted to supply 173 desktop computers and Mid-End Computers and Hardware who were supposed to supply 79 laptops.
The laptops were each valued at US$9 264,48 while desktop computers were each valued at US$3 076,61 resulting in the cancellation of the tenders for the two companies.
Permanent Secretary Mr George Guvamatanga said the US$ prices where inflated, making reference to Government’s directive that line Ministries and Government agencies must ensure value for money in their procurement.
“First things first, the question is, at the end of it all, we want to say did everything go right in this particular instance? We are saying no as an authority, so where did we miss it? The first one is in terms of the movement of the budgeted (money) to the actual one which was then submitted for payment,” Mr Ruswa said.
He said in their procurement plan for the year, Parliament had budgeted US$3 500 as the purchase price for each laptop and questioned how the legislative body ended up approving payment of the over US$9 000 for a single machine.
“Personally, I met executives from the procuring authority, five of them in August and we deliberated on this issue and gave guidance to say when you are faced with such, invoke Section 42 of the Act (the Public Procurement and Disposal of Public Assets Act) which you can use to cancel (the tender), citing budgetary constraints because my thinking then was that there is no way you can go ahead with a procurement which is four times what you would have budgeted for,” he added.
Mr Ruswa said that after noticing that the prices were beyond what was budgeted for, the suppliers tried to negotiate for downward review which is not permissible by law.
“Thus, I am saying there are other issues which need to be debated at another forum to say what was happening,” he added.
He said an official at PRAZ was now facing disciplinary measures after they failed to advise the Special Procurement Oversight Committee on the anomalies of the tender processes.
The SPOC is tasked with reviewing tenders awarded by procurement authorities.
A director of one of the losing bidders, Avantis, Mr Ari Goldstein, also appeared before PAC and said he was the one who wrote to Finance and Economic Development Permanent Secretary about the anomalies in the tender processes that resulted in the cancellation of the tender.
He said his company had quoted a price of just over US$3 000 for the laptops and queried the manner in which he lost the tender. – The Herald
