By Peter Kiragu
THE Nairobi county government has been stopped from awarding its 2013-2014 general insurance business to Amaco insurance company. This is after CIC Insurance lodged a complaint with the Public Procurement Oversight Authority over the way the more than Sh90 million tender was awarded.
Only the two insurance companies, out of 12, qualified for the financial evaluation after scoring above the required technical score of 70 per cent as was set in the bid document.
Amaco, which is associated with Deputy President William Ruto, was granted the tender after scoring the highest in both the technical and financial evaluations. It quoted the lowest amount at Sh87.8 million against CIC's Sh88.4 million.
The tender was given to Amaco on June 3 but CIC lodged a review at PPOA on June 17 arguing that the City Council had broken the public procurement laws in awarding the tender.
CIC and other companies claimed that Amaco had not earned or transacted annual gross premiums of Sh600 million under the general insurance business excluding motor insurance as was stipulated in the tender document. Amaco had only transacted Sh370.8 million worth of business against CIC's Sh4.3 billion.
But in its submission, Amaco said it is too late to lodge a review against a tender that is already granted. Amaco termed the request for a review as unlawful, invalid, null and void, which amounts to abuse of the process of the PPOA review board.
In its defence, the City Council said it had been issued with the insurance cover and made the payment by the time it was notified of the request for review. As such, the request for review had been overtaken by event.
But CIC said it filed the review request in time since it was notified of its unsuccessful bid on June 3 and had up to June 18 to lodge the complaint. In addition, CIC and Amaco were notified of the outcome of the tender on different dates which is a breach of the Procurement Act.
Source: allAfrica.com
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