SHAL­IZA HAS­SANALI

Oropouche East MP Dr Roodal Mooni­lal be­lieves a tech­ni­cal glitch which caused the Ur­ban De­vel­op­ment Cor­po­ra­tion (UDE­COTT) e-ten­der plat­form to in­tro­duce a third bid­der on the Port-of-Spain Gen­er­al Hos­pi­tal Cen­tral Block project, days af­ter the bid­ding was closed, should be im­me­di­ate­ly in­ves­ti­gat­ed, as the mat­ter points to bid-rig­ging and im­prop­er con­duct of pro­cure­ment.

Speak­ing at a Unit­ed Na­tion­al Con­gress me­dia con­fer­ence at the Of­fice of the Op­po­si­tion Leader in Port-of-Spain yes­ter­day, Mooni­lal made the com­ment as he re­ferred to a Sun­day Guardian ar­ti­cle head­lined “Com­pa­nies up­set af­ter ‘tech­ni­cal glitch’ in­tro­duced a third bid­der for UDE­COTT hos­pi­tal con­tract.”

The ar­ti­cle re­port­ed that State com­pa­nies UDE­COTT and the Telecom­mu­ni­ca­tions Ser­vices of T&T (TSTT) are de­fend­ing a “tech­ni­cal glitch” that caused UDE­COTT’s e-Ten­der plat­form to in­tro­duce a third bid­der on the project days af­ter the bid­ding was closed.

The ar­ti­cle re­port­ed that at the close of bid­ding on May 20, two bid­ders and their re­spec­tive prices were list­ed as suc­cess­ful­ly up­loaded on the e-ten­der plat­form, which is man­aged by UDE­COTT but tech­no­log­i­cal­ly sup­port­ed by TSTT.

How­ev­er, af­ter the bids were in and the ten­der was of­fi­cial­ly closed, two com­pa­nies — Yorke Struc­tures and Steel Struc­tures — were the on­ly com­pa­nies list­ed as suc­cess­ful and both were told to pre­pare for a pre­sen­ta­tion of their method­ol­o­gy the com­ing Mon­day. Af­ter both pre­sen­ta­tions, they were on­ly then in­formed that a third com­pa­ny was al­so in the mix and would be pre­sent­ing the same day.

Ex­press­ing his dis­gust at this new de­vel­op­ment, Mooni­lal yes­ter­day said, “So the first two which you opened and you saw...you would have seen the amount and da­ta for two bid­ders ...and the third bid­der the doc­u­ments came in late...that com­pa­ny would have al­ready known the con­tents of the first two bids. Even the third bid­der hy­po­thet­i­cal­ly, I cast no as­per­sions, could have had in­for­ma­tion on the first two bids. But they are say­ing that what hap­pened, they re­al­ly put it on time, but it did not come in on time be­cause there was a glitch.”

Mooni­lal said this in­ci­dent re­quires “a full in­quiry and in­ves­ti­ga­tion be­cause there is now the is­sue that the third bid­der ap­pears to be the suc­cess­ful bid­der.”

“So, the glitch, what­ev­er it was, didn’t make no dif­fer­ence in that sense. But this speaks to a very se­ri­ous mat­ter. This speaks of is­sues of bid-rig­ging. This speaks of is­sues of im­prop­er con­duct of pro­cure­ment,” he said.

The Op­po­si­tion MP said the on­ly right-think­ing thing to do is to have a fresh ten­der­ing process. He said the project has tak­en a new twist and seemed to be sur­round­ed by blight, mis­man­age­ment and cor­rup­tion, “if it is a glitch oc­curred and a third bid­der came in af­ter the time has gone but ap­par­ent­ly sent it in be­fore the time but could not up­load.”

Mooni­lal said even­tu­al­ly, these is­sues will form a bur­den on the back of Prime Min­is­ter Dr Kei­th Row­ley and the Gov­ern­ment “and hope­ful­ly, with the help of God and the peo­ple, we will re­move this Gov­ern­ment.”