The Philippine Charity Sweepstakes Office (PCSO) again disqualified a Chinese company from participating in the agency’s bidding for the P6.5-billion Nationwide Online Lottery System project, after the firm failed to submit original copies of bidding documents required by the law.
The state lottery firm’s special bids and awards committee (SBAC), which reconvened on Wednesday “under protest,” found that JV Genlot failed to produce an original and notarized board secretary’s certificate, as well as an original copy of a board resolution that gave authority to Ryan Wong to represent the Chinese company.
During Wednesday’s second reopening of bids for JV Genlot, Wong admitted that he could not find the original hard copies of the documents but insisted he was sure he submitted these in May.
This is the third time that JV Genlot was disqualified from participating in bidding proceedings for the project.
On April 21, the SBAC found that the company submitted an expired mayor’s permit, while its disqualification on May 31 was due to the fact that it also failed to translate some of its documents to English.
JV Genlot is composed of United Technic Corp., Digi-Specs IT Corp. and Genlot Game Technology Co. Ltd., and is a wholly owned subsidiary of Telling Telecommunication Holding Co. Ltd., which supplies mobile phones to China Mobile and China Unicom.
Following its second disqualification, JV Genlot filed a request for reconsideration before the SBAC that was denied on June 9 but was later reversed by the PCSO board on June 24.
This resulted in the resignation of five SBAC members in an effort to “uphold the cold neutrality” of the committee.
Not the rule
Wong maintained during the second reopening of bids that the sixth edition of the Philippine Bidding Documents (PBD) for goods and services allowed the submission of duplicates of the board secretary’s certificate and a board resolution.
But the SBAC argued that this was not the rule cited on page 45 of the PBD, which it said had asked for one original copy of each of the documents and nine duplicates.
“What Genlot submitted are [duplicate] copies. That is the reason why the SBAC requested Mr. Wong to help us [find the original copies] because it may be misplaced, right? We are not questioning the number of documents submitted,” the committee stressed.
“We are not here to find fault. In fact, we are trying to help [Wong]. If [the original copies] are available, help us look for it,” it added.
Wong, however, was not able to produce the original copy after sifting through the previously submitted bidding documents nor was he able to convince the SBAC of his interpretation of the PBD, and the committee declared that JV Genlot’s bid failed.
The long-planned P6.5-billion project aimed to centralize technology systems to replace the PCSO’s decades-old lottery system for Luzon, Visayas and Mindanao. INQ