A pan­el of the Of­fice of the Pro­cure­ment Reg­u­la­tor (OPR) has de­ter­mined that the Hous­ing De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion may have de­vi­at­ed from the re­quest for pro­pos­als (RFP) and oth­er doc­u­ments when it pub­lished an in­ten­tion to award the con­tract to build hous­ing units at San­ta Rosa to Chi­na Har­bour En­gi­neer­ing Com­pa­ny.

Chi­na Har­bour was se­lect­ed by HDC af­ter it sub­mit­ted a pro­pos­al to con­struct 644 hous­ing units for $475.83 mil­lion on the 74-acre par­cel of land at San­ta Rosa. Chi­na Har­bour’s cost per unit was $738,871.13.

Two of the bid­ders for the HDC con­tract ini­ti­at­ed chal­lenge pro­ceed­ings against the HDC with­in the 14-day pe­ri­od stand­still pe­ri­od stip­u­lat­ed in the Pub­lic Pro­cure­ment and Dis­pos­al of Pub­lic Prop­er­ty Act.

A three-mem­ber hear­ing pan­el of the OPR de­liv­ered writ­ten rea­sons for the pro­cure­ment reg­u­la­tor’s de­ci­sion to sus­pend the pro­cure­ment pro­ceed­ings for the San­ta Rosa hous­ing de­vel­op­ment on Au­gust 22.

In its writ­ten rea­sons, the hear­ing pan­el ad­dressed the ap­pli­ca­tion to re­view the process sub­mit­ted by NH In­ter­na­tion­al (Caribbean) Ltd.

In its rea­sons, the hear­ing pan­el stat­ed that NH In­ter­na­tion­al, whose ex­ec­u­tive chair­man is vet­er­an con­trac­tor Emile Elias, had raised the fol­low­ing al­le­ga­tions and grounds for re­view:

• That Chi­na Har­bour breached the in­struc­tions to bid­ders and sub­mit­ted a de­sign that would not have been ap­proved by the Town and Coun­try Plan­ning Di­vi­sion;

• That the T&T com­pa­ny es­tab­lished by Chi­na Har­bour had not com­plet­ed sim­i­lar projects as out­lined in the RFP;

• That the HDC did not fol­low the stat­ed eval­u­a­tion guide­lines in the RFP and had er­ro­neous­ly used cost per unit as the met­ric for the eval­u­a­tion of the fi­nan­cial pro­pos­als; and

• That the bid­ding process pur­sued by the HDC was not in align­ment with the pro­cure­ment reg­u­la­tions “as the tech­ni­cal and fi­nan­cial pro­pos­als can­not be as­sessed as one stage as oc­curred in this pro­cure­ment.”

In ap­ply­ing the law to the facts of the mat­ter, the OPR’s hear­ing pan­el stat­ed that the HDC’s RFP for the project out­lined that in the eval­u­a­tion of the tech­ni­cal pro­pos­al “pro­po­nents must achieve no less than the min­i­mum score for each sec­tion of the pro­pos­al.”

The hear­ing pan­el found that when it re­viewed the tech­ni­cal eval­u­a­tion re­port for Chi­na Har­bour, it ap­peared that “the suc­cess­ful pro­po­nent did not re­ceive the min­i­mum score for all tech­ni­cal sec­tions.

“The im­por­tance of achiev­ing at least the min­i­mum score for all tech­ni­cal sec­tions was fur­ther am­pli­fied by the fact that pro­po­nents were ad­vised in the RFP that ‘where the pro­po­nent has suc­cess­ful­ly achieved or sur­passed the sec­tion­al and over­all min­i­mum scores, the com­mer­cial pro­pos­al may now be eval­u­at­ed’.”

The OPR pan­el said that raised the ques­tion of whether Chi­na Har­bour met the tech­ni­cal re­quire­ments, which were nec­es­sary to progress to eval­u­a­tion of its com­mer­cial pro­pos­al.

The hear­ing pan­el said the RFP al­so re­quired that de­signs shall be pre­pared in ac­cor­dance with guide­lines, reg­u­la­tions and le­gal re­quire­ments of all gov­ern­men­tal statu­to­ry and reg­u­la­to­ry agen­cies in­clud­ing the Town and Coun­try Plan­ning Di­vi­sion.

The pan­el not­ed that in Chi­na Har­bour’s tech­ni­cal eval­u­a­tion re­port, there were com­ments in­di­cat­ing that it was ‘not clear­ly stat­ed’ or ‘un­der­sized’.

“This rais­es the ques­tion of whether the pro­pos­al of the suc­cess­ful pro­po­nent met the Town and Coun­try Plan­ning Di­vi­sion re­quire­ments as stip­u­lat­ed in the RFP,” ac­cord­ing to the hear­ing pan­el.

It al­so not­ed that there was no ref­er­ence to cost per unit be­ing utilised by eval­u­a­tors in the com­mer­cial pro­pos­als.