Public procurement rules: ‘Tenders should not favour specific suppliers’

Rental power plants were ‘mother of corruption’: TIP.

KARACHI:

Transparency International-Pakistan (TIP) Adviser Syed Adil Gilani said on Thursday that public procurement rules made it mandatory that tender requirements were not supplier-specific to ensure a level playing field for all bidders.

Addressing a seminar on Sindh Public Procurement Rules 2010, Gilani said complete evaluation criteria should be a part of bidding documents so that bidders could evaluate their proposals themselves.

Referring to the role of TIP, he said that rental power plants were “mother of corruption” in Pakistan and TIP had asked the then finance minister Shaukat Tareen to scrap the entire project because the bidding process was full of discrepancies.

Gilani said TIP had also played a key role in highlighting corruption in the cases of National Insurance Company Limited and Pakistan Steel Mills, which prompted the judiciary to take notice.

Addressing the seminar, procurement specialist Uzma Sadaf, who works for the World Bank, said public procurement accounted for 12 to 15% of Gross Domestic Product in developing countries. She said adherence to public procurement rules by government organisations built trust in the private sector and encouraged healthy competition and fair practices in bidding processes.

Sindh Public Procurement Regulatory Authority Director Abdul Wahab Soomro explained all 90 rules of the Sindh Public Procurement Rules 2010, to the audience. He said government organisations would stay clear of legal trouble if they followed the public procurement rules.

Published in The Express Tribune, October 29^th, 2011.