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Meeting discusses unfair bidding
Bidders took advantage of a meeting in Ha Noi last week to complain that many contracts continue to be awarded through unfair bidding processes, a full five years after the Law on Tendering took effect.
The meeting was held by the Ministry of Planning and Investment to review the first five years of implementation of the law and its supporting regulations.
The law had created a legal framework for fair and healthy competition in bidding, said the deputy director of the ministry's bidding management department, Nguyen Xuan Dao.
However, the head of the Red River Corporation's bidding office, Phung Quang Hai, urged regulators to crack down on the practice of subsidiaries of State-owned enterprises bidding for projects tendered by their parent companies.
"Our corporation has been operating under the parent-subsidiary model, and the law stipulates that investors and contractors must be independent, requiring our subsidiaries not to bid on the corporation's projects," Hai said.
But the deputy head of the Construction Economics Institute, Nguyen Anh Tuan, disagreed, suggesting abolition of the regulation barring contractors and investors from belonging to the same unit.
Tuan called the regulation infeasible and inconsistent with reality, especially in the construction industry, in which only a few enterprises specialised in mining or telecommunications projects.
Nguyen Minh Tuyen, Deputy Director of the Department of Construction and Transport Quality Control, agreed, saying the provision "caused difficulties for investors in choosing a suitable bidder."
Bidding for supply contracts also drew the attention of participants at the meeting.
Nguyen Dinh Riu from the Da River Corporation said the law included criteria for evaluating the quality of goods tendered, including the experience and production capacity of the tenderer and materials quality.
"However, these factors can only be technical parameters listed in catalogues and don't suggest the real quality of equipment," Riu said.
He said the law required the listing of trademarks and certificates of origin in bidding applications but that some bidders had violated the regulation.
Riu and others at the meeting urged State administrative offices to issue more specific technical criteria to control the quality of goods and increase oversight on bidding processes.
vietamnews
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