Mystery of ‘post’ qualification

It is another tricky situation for the DOTC, the Department of Transportation and Communications, which is the biggest executive department of the government, as it screens the highest bidder in the P17.5-billion Mactan-Cebu airport project.

The bidder is the consortium of publicly listed construction company Megawide and foreign partner GMR Airport of India, which submitted a bid of P14.4 billion.

Reports said that the second highest bidder, the consortium of local real estate firm Filinvest and Singapore-based Changi Airports International, had questioned the qualification of the Megawide-GMR consortium to do the Cebu project because of “conflict of interest.”

The after-the-fact process is always the tricky part of the bidding for government contracts. You see, under the bidding rules for the Cebu airport project, the DOTC reserves the right to do the so-called post bidding qualification.

In a way, the DOTC wants to check the veracity of the information filed by the bidders, particularly the consortium that submitted the highest bid. In other words, the DOTC would still be wondering, after all the evaluation before the bidding, whether the highest bidder would be the right one for the job.

You can only wonder why the DOTC did not want to verify the information, claims and statements submitted by the bidders during the “pre-qualification” stage of the bidding.

After all, the DOTC already did a lot of “pre-qualification” work, supposedly to screen the qualifications of all the five consortia that joined the Cebu project bidding, namely, the Ayala group, the San Miguel group, the Filinvest group, the Megawide group and the First Holdings group.

What would happen if you would do some “post qualification” processes in any other contests such as the PBA professional basketball games, reviewing the qualifications of the teams after they have already played all the games in an entire season? Perhaps, riots among the fans.

Anyway, the DOTC had postponed the awarding of the contract to the highest bidder, Megawide-GMR, which should have been done last week, precisely because of the allegation of conflict of interest against the consortium.

Apparently, Filinvest-Changi claimed that GMR Infrastructure of India, the foreign partner in the consortium that submitted the highest bid, has been a partner of another foreign company in a few airport projects.

That other foreign company was Malaysian Airport Holdings Berhad. It so happened that the Malaysian firm was also the foreign partner in another consortium that joined the Cebu project bidding.

The local partner was the First Philippine Holdings. Their group was called the First Philippine-Malaysian consortium, which actually submitted a mysteriously low bid of P4.7 billion. This was in fact the lowest bid, not even half of those coming from the other groups. The four other prequalified bidders each submitted bids of at least P10 billion.

Anyway, according to DOTC officials, under the “post qualification” process, if the DOTC would find out that any bidder had a “direct” relation with any member of another bidder, the DOTC could disqualify both bidders for conflict of interest.

OK, the DOTC found out that GMR Infrastructure of India (partner of Megawide) and Malaysian Airport (partner of First Holdings) have all along been partners in all of GMR airport projects.

Moreover, the managing director of Malaysian Airport has been sitting in the boards of all the GMR airport affiliates.

Now the rules also said that if the DOTC would disqualify the highest bidder in the post qualification stage, it would have to screen the qualification of the next highest bidder, which happened to be the Filinvest-Changi consortium.

We can only wonder how the DOTC would resolve the issue.

* * *

In another bidding, the one for the supply of trains and cars for the Edsa MRT line, the DOTC hired a foreign consultant to do an equivalent of the “post qualification” process.

Last year, after several months of delay, the DOTC held the bidding for the supply of 48 units of light rail vehicles (LRV) to augment the depleted train stock of the Edsa line, which served more than 600,000 commuters a day.

The DOTC hired the foreign consultant to review the bidding process, whether or not everything was in order. The thing was, who else would review the findings of the foreign consultant but also the DOTC.

Which should only tell us that the idea of “post” bidding screening would only bring problems.

Anyway, the DOTC head, Secretary Joseph Emilio Abaya, already promised the hundreds of thousands of commuters on the Edsa line that the new LRVs would start arriving from abroad by December this year.

Recently, the DOTC awarded the supply contract to the Dalian Automotive and Rolling Stocks Co., which is based in the southern part of China, for a contract price of P3.8 billion.

But then again it would take Dalian about three years to deliver all the 48 units of LRV.