MOMBASA: A businessman has sued to stop the procurement of cranes to be used at the Mombasa port.
Filed under a certificate of urgency, the petition seeks to challenge the Sh3 billion tender for the supply and commissioning of three ships-to-shore gantry cranes.
Maur Abdalla says the winning bidder has violated tender requirements and the cranes might be of inferior quality, ripping the public out of millions of shillings.
Abdalla says Liebherr Container Cranes has deviated from all the conditions contained in the tender specification and contract.
He says instead, the supplier is now about to instal substitute cranes of inferior type.
“The subject three cranes have not been acquired according to the specification in the tender and procurement process,” Abdalla says in a sworn statement.
Justice Said Chitembwe, sitting in Malindi, certified the suit urgent and directed him to serve all the parties named ahead of the hearing on Monday.
The kits for the cranes were to be shipped from abroad, but according to Abdalla, the supplier has allegedly contracted another firm, Cormaco Ship Yard, who is assembling the cranes at a Mombasa yard.
“We have discovered the assembling, erection, testing, installing and commission is being done within the Port of Mombasa at Cormaco Ship Yard in utter violation and breach of terms of the tender specification and the general conditions of contract,” Abdalla says.
He says the cranes were to be delivered at the port fully erected, assembled, commissioned and tested in the contractor’s yard and not in the procuring authority entity yard.
Abdalla had challenged the tender in 2013, but his appeal before the Public Procurement Administrative Review Board was dismissed on a technicality.
He wants the court to inspect the yard in Mombasa and if satisfied, quash the tender.
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