Notorious for tender fraud, Philemon Kandie finds himself in yet another familiar situation.
Kenya Rural Roads Authority (KeRRA) is in the eye of a storm over the irregular award of a Sh4.6 billion road tender in a deal that a State regulator says would have seen some officials walk home with a cool Sh1 billion.
Consequently, the Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA) has waded into the matter and stopped KeRRA from awarding the lucrative tender to a company the former says was the highest bidder, contrary to public procurement laws.
The procurement authority has accused some allegedly corrupt senior KeRRA members of staff, whom it describes as “a criminal enterprise”, for conniving with some politicians to change the goal posts to ensure that the tender was awarded to a particular company of their choice.
The procurement regulator says the tender was irregularly awarded to M/s Shengli Engineering Construction with a total bid amount of Sh4,692,818,332 instead of M/s Guanxi Hydroelectric that had the lowest bid amount of Sh 3,964,406,845 as per the regulations.
“All this was done in a conspiracy meant to make sure that the qualification criteria fit the qualifications of particular bidders. This conspiracy was hatched and executed by a criminal enterprise consisting of corrupt KeRRA members of staff,” PPRA warned.
The authority further warned: “The procurement process of these subject tenders is nothing more than a scheme to defraud Kenyan taxpayers through a well calculated conspiracy to defraud in collusion with politically connected individuals as demonstrated below.”
The authority goes on to remind KeRRA that it has the mandate and responsibility to guard against loss of public funds and resources.
“We remind you that as the accounting officer, you are mandated under section 44 (1) of the act to ensure compliance with the requirements of the act and further that you should ensure that public resources are efficiently spent and safeguarded without any loss,” PPRA Director General Patrick K. Wanjuki warned in a letter dated March 26.
In the letter to his KeRRA counterpart Engineer Philemon K. Kandie, Wanjuki tells the roads authority to immediately stop the procurement process, pending further instructions from the regulatory body.
“We therefore direct that you should not take any further action in processing the subject procurements, until you receive our further instructions, which we shall issue after reviewing the response and documents that we had instructed you to submit vide our earlier letter referenced above,” Wanjuki warned.
In acknowledgment, Kandie in a letter dated April 8 says the authority has stopped the procurement process in line with PPRA’s recommendation.
“This is to inform you that the Authority has given a decision to re-evaluate the above tender and based on that, we have embarked on the same immediately,” says Eng Kandie.
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