Airport maintenance contracts in Solomons cut off

Transcript

Lucrative airport maintenance contracts worth hundreds of thousands of US dollars have been declared null and void by the Solomon Islands Ministry of Finance this week pending a review of tender processes.

The ministry's move is being applauded by Transparency International who say many past contracts were obtained illegally.

TSI Chief Executive Daniel Fenua told Koroi Hawkins he is urging the ministry to keep up the good work.

DANIEL FENUA: So basically what happened in the past, the process of tendering, was not being done procedurally. So usually the maintenance the government usually puts out a tender where it calls for conductors to come to apply for the bid for and the winning bidders usually get a contract. And what they will be doing is just cleaning up airports and maintaining to the standards expected. But we believe that some of these some of the people who have been awarded the contracts were not actually meeting the standards expected, probably not following the procedures as well.

KOROI HAWKINS: And I understand there's quite a lot of money involved in these contracts for airports, provincial airports and the international airport. How much are we talking about?

DF: Absolutely, you know, last year one of the projects that was allocated to one of the contractors was around about $2 million, so it's quite a lot of money, a huge amount of money available to maintain airports. And we understand that this will be still continuing, the government will still allocate a huge amount of money for these airports.

KH: And what is it that they've done? You say a notice, have they stopped contracts, have they changed contracts, have they published people who have got contracts - what is it that they have done that you are applauding them for?

DF: Basically what they have done in here, is that they have put a notice in which they mention inside the notice where all the contractors, all the current arrangements, are being declared null and void, meaning they would not be able to continue until the ministry of finance would carry out a review and they would put out a proper tender calling for contractors to submit their application.

KH: And are you advocating that the government should do this in other areas of procurement in other ministries?

DF: Yeah, absolutely, governments, this is not strictly to the aviation or to the maintenance of airports only, but there is a huge amount of money allocated for other goods and services as well in which it will require in the public sector to call for tender and from our point of view this is just the start of the whole thing to the new process. Just putting out notice a notice, a public notice like this, is the first step, but then the public would want to know how the contracts have been awarded and on what basis, and if they can come out publicly and put out in the papers as well winning bidders of public procurement process, yeah.