When is the beginning of the year? tender for the modernization of Belgrade traffic lights contested for the first time, it seemed that the decision of the Republican Commission for the Protection of Bidders' Rights would be an opportunity to remove the disputed conditions and ensure real competition in obtaining this important and lucrative business. When i the second attempt ended before the same Commission, it became clear that the problem was not an accidental omission in the tender documentation.
Now the Commission is deciding on the same procedure for the third time, and the most important question is no longer the controversial provision, but why it keeps returning, in different forms.
He points to this fact for "Vreme" Nikola Radin economist, authorized internal auditor in the public sector and executive director of the organization "Belgrade on the move".
750 million dinars
It is about the unification of adaptive light signaling management systems in Belgrade, i.e. traffic lights, a work worth about 750 million dinars that determines who in the coming years will manage one of the most sensitive segments of the city's infrastructure - traffic at intersections through which hundreds of thousands of people pass every day. Such deals, as a rule, attract the attention of the market.
The first tender was rejected, let's recall, in short, because the conditions of the tender were artificially inflated, the stated criteria many times exceed the actual scope of work, "and certain technical requirements, such as the mandatory fiber optic network, were introduced solely to eliminate everyone except the well-known bidder Yunex Traffic doo, which according to these criteria is the only one that meets the requirements", Nikola Radin explained at the time.
It turned out that the conditions from the documentation of the second tender, let's say that the bidder must prove that he has achieved a turnover of at least 1,5 billion dinars in business of this type, lead to the mentioned bidder. That threshold was twice the value of the contract itself.
And for the third time Yunex
Nikola Radin says that this latest version of the tender also leads to Yunex Traffic.
"The bidder must have a reference from a city with more than a million inhabitants. Such a condition did not exist in the previous two procedures. The explanation did not explain why the number of inhabitants is crucial for the work related to the unification of existing traffic management systems and the integration of forty intersections. The number of inhabitants is not a technical characteristic of the traffic light system, nor does it speak about its reliability or the quality of the work performed. But that is why it has a very specific consequence - according to the information from the procedure, it practically corresponds only to Yunex Traffic doo"
Photo: Private archiveNikola Radin
Radin explains that the procedure in public procurement "must enable real competition. If the criteria are set so that the circle of possible bidders is narrowed, then the question naturally arises whether the goal is to find the best offer or to confirm a pre-expected outcome."
Aptitude test
"It is for this reason that this third decision of the Republic Commission, which is ongoing, becomes a test of the institutions' ability to protect the basic principles of public procurement - competition, equal treatment of bidders and responsible spending of public money."
Therefore, it does not matter that the tender for traffic lights was challenged for the third time, "but that after two previous challenges no attempt was made to eliminate the reason for which the dispute arose. On the contrary, a new criterion was introduced that opened up new doubts. Thus, the essence does not change from procedure to procedure, but only the way in which the same issues are brought back to the same institution".
If the Republican Commission concludes for the third time that the conditions of the tender are not correct, "then it will be difficult to claim that it is a series of misunderstandings or administrative errors", says Nikola Radin.
"Then a much more serious question will remain: who is responsible for the fact that the procedure of public interest goes back to the beginning three times and why the criteria, instead of opening the competition, continued to close it," concludes Nikola Radin.
Podgorica at a different price
He also adds a "treat" to this story.
He says that "Belgrade on the Move" received information from its partner organization from Montenegro that Yunex Traffic doo offered a price approximately three times lower than the value of a similar job in Belgrade for the modernization of the traffic light management system in Podgorica. The conditions of this tender, as in Belgrade, are considered by the Commission for the Protection of Bidders' Rights.
"When a bidder offers the same or a comparable job in Podgorica at three times cheaper price, and there is practically no competition in the tender in Belgrade, citizens have the right to suspect that the problem is not the traffic lights, but the way the tenders are written," says Nikola Radin.
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