An LTO employee shows some driver’s licenses that have yet to be distributed. (File Photo of the INQUIRER / NIÑO JESUS ORBETA)
Drivers may have to wait longer for their plastic licenses to be issued after a Quezon City court stopped the procurement and delivery of around 5.2 million plastic cards under a P240-million deal between the Land Transportation Office (LTO) and the winning bidder.
LTO chief Vigor Mendoza II announced at a press briefing on Thursday that the Quezon City Regional Trial Court Branch 215 had issued a 20-day temporary restraining order (TRO) against his agency and Banner Plastic Card Inc. based on the petition of a competitor, AllCard Inc.
According to AllCard, the Department of Transportation’s bids and awards committee committed “grave abuse of discretion” by disqualifying it from participating in the bidding for the P240-million deal, although it had offered the lowest bid of P176.8 million.
But in its postqualification evaluation report for the procurement, the bids and awards committee’s technical working group noted delays in AllCard’s ongoing contracts with the Social Security System and Land Bank of the Philippines, prompting it to disqualify the company.
Mendoza said the TRO was a “temporary setback” but he remained optimistic that the court would favor them during a hearing set on Aug. 22.
“The greater public interest should prevail over the business interest of one or two. At the end of the day, the issue will boil down to grave and irreparable damage and we don’t see those [in this case],” he added.
But should the court not rule in the LTO’s favor, Mendoza said they would resort to temporary measures, including the extension of the validity of existing driving licenses and their digital versions.
Banner Plastic Card has so far delivered 100,000 plastic cards for driver’s licenses and is expected to supply 1 million more in the first 60 days, or by the end of September.
According to Mendoza, once the company completes the delivery, it will wipe out more than half of the 1.7 million backlog in driver’s licenses nationwide.