KFW rejects government’s claims

Top Channel possesses another official document of a meeting that was held one month ago in Frankfurt between the TSO director, Arben Ibro, his Kosovo Homologue, Fadil Ismajli, and the German KFW Bank representatives for resolving a conflict of scandalous proportions.

In this meeting TSO defended its decision for changing the winner by using as main argument the fact that the Albanian law of procurements does not allow to declare as winner a company that has offered a higher price for a tender.

Argument 1 – The German KFW Bank argues that by declaring as winner the Croatian “Dalekovod” Company, ranked first in this tender, is not against the Albanian law of procurements, as the Albanian Government and the TSO claims. According to the KFW, the evaluation process that declared the Croatians as winners is in full accordance with the Albanian law of procurements, more concretely law 55, which says that the contracting authority assesses and compares the offers based on criteria that are set before the tender. According to this article quoted by KFW, no other criteria can be used for the evaluation of the winner, if it is not foreseen by the tender documents.
 
Argument 2 – The TSO director presented other arguments in the Frankfurt meeting for defending his decision that changed the winner. According to him, the consulent of the tender has notified the Croatian company that they were declared winners without notifying the Albanian TSO first. But the General Director of the consulting “Intec” Company showed as evidence in this meeting a copy of the e-mail that was sent to the Director of the TSO Project Implementation Unit.

Argument 3 – Mr. Ibro claimed that TSO has not approved the final evaluation report for the tender, which declared the Croatian Company as winner. But this claim has been rejected by the KFW, which says that TSO has approved the three evaluation phases of the tender, the post-qualification, the technical and financial evaluation. The final evaluation, according to KFW, only gathers the three divided evaluations in a single one.

Argument 4 – Finally Mr. Ibro uses the argument that the price difference between two offers is high, and he could not declare “Dalekovod” as winner, which has offered a price that is 8.6 million EUR higher. But the German Bank has rejected this claim with three arguments. First, KFW says that the price is in normal levels for high tension projects. And secondly, the TSO has previously agreed with the evaluation formula, which gives more importance to the technical criterion than to the financial one, declaring as winner a company that regardless the higher price, it has more technical guarantees.

KFW concludes with another argument that definitively rejects the economic bargain argument of this decision. According to KFW, the Albanian government has only two options: accepting the Croatian company as winner or canceling the tender and holding a new one.

But the costs of the new tender mount at least to 15 million EUR, or twice the difference of the price between the companies, without including the costs that will be created if the Croatians will sue the Albanian government.

Top Channel