T&T company’s bids for health contracts on hold
she added.
Asked if she, as minister had asked for an explanation on the contract award, given the BoI’s recommendations, Lawrence pointed to the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board (NPTAB). “There are procedures to be followed with NPTAB and everything. It doesn’t matter if it was sole-sourced, it goes to NPTAB. I think you should talk to NPTAB,” she said.
When this newspaper had visited the NPTAB seeking clarity on the contract, its head Berkeley Wickham refused to comment.
The Ministry of Public Health’s Procurement Officer informed that he did have a meeting with the minister on Friday. “We had some discourse on Western Scientific,” he said, but he could not say much more than he had already explained and surmised that there was a hold on other contracts “for review purposes,” while adding that “the ministry will write you officially.”
Asked to supply
But sources close to the Ministry of Public Health told the Sunday Stabroek that it was following this newspaper’s report that the NAPS contract was singlesourced despite the BoI’s recommendations that “a decision from higher up” was taken to put on hold and have reviews of all other contracts the company has tendered for.
One source explained that the legality of pulling contracts already granted to the company would “leave the ministry subject to court action from the company” since they were not blacklisted by Guyana and was “free to tender for any contract they so wish.” As a result, the company will fulfill the obligations under the current contracts it has with government, pending reviews of others it has bid for.
“As you all reported also, indeed there is no debarment laws here and it was not as if the company put in a bid, you have to remember that the Ministry asked this company to supply it. They gave the contract. So to go back and say ‘Look boy, you can’t get this contract because IDB Sun Mon or a Commission of Inquiry say this that or the other’ would open you up for the company taking the government to court. You have to understand that a move like that leaves the ministry subject to court action from the company,” the source posited.
“There are also other factors but that is another matter, but what I want to say is that procurement practices are not as easy as some believe,” the source added.
The ministry would have to say which of its officials single-sourced the supplies from Western Scientific and on what grounds.
Chairman of the Public
Procurement Commission (PPC) Carol Corbin had told Stabroek News that the body would be examining the contract granted to Western Scientific Company Limited.
However, not much should be expected of the findings since the country has no debarment laws and the sole-sourcing obviated competitive bidding. “We will be looking at it,” Corbin said in an interview last week.
While there has been no formal complaint following the granting of the NAPS contract to the company, the PPC would be examining the circumstances of how the contract was awarded.
The PPC Chairman explained that not only are there no debarment laws in Guyana to guide evaluators but, moreover, this particular contract was not reviewed by evaluators since it was solesourced through the procuring entity, the Ministry of Public Health.
“There is no debarment law established which allows the entities to blacklist the contractors. They [the procuring entities] have to operate within the law. So if they do not select a contractor and they say it is on the basis of them committing some fraud or something of that nature, suppose that contractor carries them to court? What will they resort to? But in all fairness to them, an entity should access all relevant information when they are evaluating tenders but you can only evaluate based on what is in your tender document and your evaluation criteria. So if the evaluation criteria don’t include a specific reference to your due diligence about specific contractors, your evaluators won’t be able to substantiate any decision that they make. They can only work with what is in front of them and those would be the evaluation criteria,” she said.
“Anyway, what I noted is that it would not have even reached that point because it was a sole-sourced item. So for solesourcing, you would have on your list of vendors or contractors, persons who are authorised to distribute [or] to procure a particular item. I was reading the newspaper and I saw where reference was being made that it was not advertised properly and all of that. But with sole-sourcing you don’t advertise, because you would have already had in your data base, that this particular vendor is the authorised vendor for this particular item…you would ask the vendor for a quotation of the item because over the years this is what you would have been doing and so you select that vendor,” she added.
But in the case of Western Scientific Company, Corbin said that there may have been a “communication gap” that allowed the company to secure the contract. “There must have been some, I would say, gap in communication internally to the Ministry of Public Health because they should have had information saying to them that as a result of this commission of inquiry this company was involved in fraud and corruption,” she noted.
“But as to how robust the results of the CoI [that recommended blacklisting] were, I don’t know. Can the Ministry of [Public] Health rely on that? If there was a specific recommendation to the Ministry of [Public] Health and they didn’t adhere, then that is an issue, but one would have to verify and then look at the whole legality of that,” she added.
The PPC Chairman noted that the mere fact that it was sole-sourcing was because the ministry had probably “concluded at some point and time that this was the only way of getting the particular item here locally.”