News
Seven of eight e-passport bidders lose tender, protest to appeal board
View(s):By Namini Wijedasa
Seven out of eight parties that bid for the Department of Immigration and Emigration’s (DIE) tender to personalise its upcoming e-Passport consignments were rejected as non-responsive, authoritative sources said, adding that several parties last week lodged a strong protest with the Procurement Appeal Board (PAB).
The DIE recently announced its “intention to award” the tender to Thales DIS Finland OY and its Sri Lankan partner, Just In Time (JIT) Technologies (Pvt) Ltd.
The successful bidder must implement a two-key encryption solution that will enable the Sri Lankan passport’s unique public key infrastructure (PKI) to be registered with the International Civil Aviation Organisation’s (ICAO) public key directory (PKD) for access by immigration authorities worldwide.
A separate procurement for e-Passport books was earlier won by the Thales-JIT joint venture. But a large quantity of that order continues to be delivered as ordinary machine-readable passports (MRPs) to tide over a severe shortage of travel documents caused by the e-passport tender being bungled. The PKI-PKD solution was advertised as a separate procurement.
But rejected bidders, some of whose proposals hadn’t even been taken up for technical evaluation, have lodged strong protests before the independent PAB, which will communicate its opinion to the Cabinet. The body reviews representations from unsuccessful bidders who challenge tender decisions and makes recommendations to the Cabinet, allowing for a fair process before contracts are finalised.
With Thales and JIT having been held responsive, only their financial bids were opened. The contract price was released as Rs. 2.28bn (inclusive of VAT). The seven rejected parties are Tahaluf Al Emarat Technical Solutions/VSIS; Madras Security Printers (Pvt) Ltd/Blue Chip Technical Services (Pvt) Ltd; United Printing & Publishing (e7)/Toppan Forms (Colombo) Ltd; IN Continu ET Service S.A.S (IN Group)/Epic Lanka (Pvt) Ltd; Veridos GmbH/Informatics (Pvt) Ltd; IRIS Corporation Berhad/Hayleys Fentons Ltd; and PWPW/South Asian Technologies (Pvt) Ltd.
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