Public procurement

Procurement body debars 13 companies, persons from gov’t contracts: In a historic move, 13 companies and persons have been debarred for varying periods by the Public Procurement Commission (PPC) from getting government contracts, including the Chinese company presently executing the East Coast Demerara road expansion project. The development follows the approval of long-awaited debarment regulations earlier this year as the PPC ramps up preparations for oversight of the spending of revenues from the oil and gas sector. Twelve of the debarments are as a result of similar action taken by the Inter-American Development Bank (IDB) and the 13th following an application by the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board, PPC Chairperson Carol Corbin told Stabroek News in an interview on Friday. “What you will be seeing soon, very soon, is the effect of [debarment regulations enforcement] because we have taken the decision to debar a contractor based on an application by the National Procurement and Tender Administration Board. “It has also allowed us to debar those contractors who have been debarred by the multilateral agencies. We are not the ones who are institutionalising the actual penalty but our regulations allows us to debar them automatically. So you won’t have a situation where they are debarred by a multilateral financial institution and we are still awarding contracts to them,” Corbin added. China Railway First Group (Guyana) Inc, which is currently engaged on the East Coast project, has been debarred for two years following a similar penalty imposed on its parent company by the IDB. The Guyana debarment will not affect its current work on the East Coast project but it won’t be able to bid on future projects here for another two years. Lethem-based contractor Vevakanand Dalip Enterprise was debarred by the IDB from December, 2017 until December 2030, which means that period will also apply here.