The Interior ministry has been ordered to re-evaluate bids in a Sh1 billion tender for the supply of new generation number plates following a court petition by Dutch firm J Knieriem.
Justice George Odunga has ruled that the Interior ministry did not evaluate all bidders when it chose to award the lucrative tender to Uganda’s MIG International and Kenya’s Tropical Technologies as earlier ordered by the Public Procurement Administrative and Review Board (PPARB).
J Knieriem, in its petition, claimed that its bid was not evaluated, and that it was not allowed to participate in the evaluation of bids and that the PPARB locked it out of the hearing of an appeal against the procurement process.
Justice Odunga yesterday held that the decision of the PPARB to award MIG and Tropical Technologies the tender was wrong as some applicants had been unfairly locked out of the evaluation process.
“It is clear that the Ministry of Interior did not carry out financial evaluation as ordered. It is my view and I so hold that the PPARB’s awarding of the tender cannot be upheld. In the result, I grant an order quashing the decision. The Ministry of Interior is hereby directed to carry out evaluation of all tenderers who made it to the financial evaluation stage,” Justice Odunga ruled.
The tender, which had been split into two, was for the supply of motorised blank number plates and for hot stamping foil.
The blank plates tender was in September awarded to Tropical Technologies which had bid $1 billion while the hot stamping foil deal went to MIG International which bid Sh140 million.
J Knieriem claimed that Tropical Technologies did not pass the technical evaluation stage as the local firm failed to obtain a manufacturer’s authorization which was mandatory for the tender. The Dutch firm had bid Sh1.3 billion for the blank plates tender.
J Knieriem adds that its Ugandan rival MIG’s Sh140 million bid for the hot stamping foil tender was not the lowest, as the Dutch firm had quoted Sh87 million.
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