At­tor­ney Gen­er­al Anand Ram­lo­gan did the right thing when he an­nounced at Thurs­day's post-Cab­i­net news con­fer­ence that the ten­der­ing process for Na­tion­al Pe­tro­le­um's (NP) $40 mil­lion trans­port con­tract should be quashed and the bid­ding process re­opened. The en­tire pro­cure­ment process was thrown in­to doubt when a Port-of-Spain at­tor­ney filed a pre-ac­tion pro­to­col let­ter-on be­half of CDS Trans­port, the com­pa­ny that had held the trans­porta­tion con­tract for ten years-chal­leng­ing the se­lec­tion of Gopaul and Com­pa­ny.

It lat­er emerged that Gopaul and Com­pa­ny was run by friends of Prime Min­is­ter Kam­la Per­sad-Bisses­sar, who had of­fered her the run of their Tu­na­puna home in the im­me­di­ate af­ter­math of the May 2010 gen­er­al elec­tion. As the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al made clear last week, when he read ex­cerpts from four le­gal opin­ions he had re­ceived on the mat­ter, the at­tempt by some to link Mrs Per­sad-Bisses­sar's stay at the Gopauls' home with the se­lec­tion of their com­pa­ny as the pre­ferred bid­der was ab­surd. T&T needs to get to the stage where the pro­cure­ment of gov­ern­ment con­tracts goes to the best can­di­date based on their abil­i­ty to do the best job at the low­est price. Whether the own­er of a firm bid­ding for a con­tract is the best friend of the Prime Min­is­ter should nei­ther help nor hin­der the pro­cure­ment process.

For state-owned com­pa­nies and for Gov­ern­ment con­tracts, the pro­cure­ment process must be com­plete­ly blind, but not dumb.

On the is­sue of the pro­cure­ment process, we note once again that one of the prin­ci­ple promis­es made by the Peo­ple's Part­ner­ship dur­ing the gen­er­al elec­tion cam­paign last year was the reg­u­lar­i­sa­tion of pro­cure­ment pro­ce­dures to em­pha­sise the tenets of trans­paren­cy, ac­count­abil­i­ty and val­ue for mon­ey.

We urge the ad­min­is­tra­tion to re­move the pro­pos­als for the over­haul of the pro­cure­ment pro­ce­dures in the pub­lic ser­vice from the back­burn­er where they have been lan­guish­ing and start the cook­ing of this all-im­por­tant leg­isla­tive re­form. In that re­gard, we salute the pub­lic-spir­it­ed in­ter­ven­tion of civ­il so­ci­ety-in the form of the T&T Man­u­fac­tur­ers' As­so­ci­a­tion, the T&T Trans­paren­cy In­sti­tute, the Cham­ber of In­dus­try and Com­merce and the Joint Con­sul­ta­tive Coun­cil for the con­struc­tion in­dus­try-which have lob­bied for pro­cure­ment re­form.

Hav­ing ad­vised that the process of ten­der­ing for the trans­port con­tract at NP should be restart­ed, the At­tor­ney Gen­er­al needs to go one step fur­ther and take a per­son­al in­ter­est in en­sur­ing that the process that is used in the new ten­der is be­yond re­proach and the peo­ple cho­sen to do the eval­u­a­tion are com­plete­ly dif­fer­ent to those who per­formed the last eval­u­a­tion. The At­tor­ney Gen­er­al found that there was some in­con­sis­ten­cy in the re­port of the eval­u­a­tion com­mit­tee. "It was im­pos­si­ble to rec­on­cile or ra­tio­nalise the score giv­en to CDS with the com­ments that they made." The Gov­ern­ment al­so needs to an­swer the ques­tion as to whether the out­sourc­ing of the trans­porta­tion is the op­ti­mum use of NP's fi­nan­cial and oth­er re­sources.

At a re­cent pub­lic meet­ing, Op­po­si­tion Leader Kei­th Row­ley charged that a tech­ni­cal study by the state-owned re­tail­er of fu­els had de­ter­mined that it would be more eco­nom­i­cal for NP to pur­chase trucks to trans­port gas than to con­tin­ue leas­ing the trucks.If that was in­deed the tech­ni­cal ad­vice that NP had re­ceived, the com­pa­ny does in­deed need to ex­plain why it de­cid­ed to scrap the pro­pos­al to do trans­porta­tion as an in-house ac­tiv­i­ty rather than out­source it.