ISLAMABAD  -  The National Highway Authority (NHA) has received extraordinary high financial bids for lot-1 and lot-2 of the Khyber Torkham Expressway, which is a part of the Khyber Pass Economic Corridor project.

As a result of a non-competitive bidding process and manipulation of system, the road authority has received about three times high financial bid for said project as the PC-I cost of the project was Rs77.9 billion but the bids received are of Rs214.2 billion.

Meanwhile, the concerned circles are also whispering about an apparent ‘pool bidding’ as there was only two companies in the run in final stage and interestingly each of them has successfully managed to win a lot of this project, which substantiated this impression.

As per the official documents available with this scribe a total of 10 companies have applied for this project in pre-qualification but three companies were declared non-responsive.

However, when technical and financial bids for this project were called, four companies submitted their bids but finally the financial bid of the two companies a joint venture of M/s ZKB – AZVIRT and a joint venture of M/s ZGCC—Matracon were opened as rest were disqualified on technical grounds.

NHA has opened these finincial bids few days ago according to which a joint venture of M/s ZKB – AZVIRT remained first lowest for the lot-1 by submitting Rs135.17 billion as its bid while M/s ZGCC—Matracon remained second lowest with a bid of Rs143.29 billion.

On the other side, the M/s ZGCC—Matracon remained successful for Lot-2 by offering Rs79.03 billion while M/s ZKB – AZVIRT have become second lowest for this package by offering Rs85.69 billion.

Well placed sources explained that a pre-qualification mode of procurement paved a way for the pool bidding and if such a high bids are accepted then a loss of billions of rupees would be caused to the public exchequer.

It is pertinent to mention here that both companies belong to two powerful parliamentarians and their companies’ performance on another Asian Development Bank’s funded Central Asian Regional Economic Connectivity project is also not up to the mark.

When contacted, the Director Public Relations NHA Mazhar Hussain has said that it is too early to comment as currently the received bids are under process of evaluation.

Regarding the reasonability of bid price he said it will get clear once the evaluation process would be completed.

A senior officer of the road authority on the condition of anonymity said that there is no doubt that the process was not fair and the bid is too much high as compare to the original PC-I.

The project is funded by the World Bank, under which an expressway is to be constructed on design built model.

NHA earmarked one kilometre wide and 102 kilometres long corridor starting from Jahgra to Torkham Boarder and contractors are at liberty to select the alignment for this road and design the project accordingly.