Tshwane businessman challenges tender

Pretoria - The City of Tshwane is embroiled in a tender row with a “big” businessman, who was allegedly overlooked for a multimillion contract despite possessing all the resources required to do the work.

Pierre Diedericks, director and shareholder of JL Excavators (Pty) Ltd, has filed an urgent court application at the Gauteng High Court, Pretoria, to interdict preferred contractors not to start work on November 1 as planned.

The tender in question was advertised last year and is for hiring general construction vehicles, yellow plant, refuse removal vehicles, specialised vehicles, equipment and machines.

According to Diedericks, his companies had been doing business with the municipality for more than 20 years and met the prerequisite requirements.

He disclosed that on a monthly basis he would invoice the city approximately R12 million.

This was payable after 30 days, he said.

In court papers, he cried foul that a co-operative associated with Tshepo 10 000, a pet-project highly praised under the administration of former mayor Kgosientso Ramokgopa, was unlawfully given an advantage over his company.

Tshepo 10 000 is a skills development programme developed by the city to empower youth to become entrepreneurs through involvement in co-operatives.

According to him, the administrative decision to include Tshepo 10 000 as one of the tender specifications was not in line with the procurement law.

He claimed that inclusion of the programme as part of the functionality by the bid specification committee constituted a material irregularity.

“The utter irrational inclusion of the utilisation of Tshepo 10 000 as part of the functionality criteria leads to the inevitable and only reasonable inference that the bid specification process was also rigged to ensure the easy manipulation of scoring at the stage of evaluation of functionality,” he said in court papers.

In September, he said, he received the news that his company had scored 67 and not the required 70 on the basis that it didn’t meet the requirement entailed in the Tshepo 10 000 programme.

“The purpose of this (court) application is to obtain an order for review and set aside the administration action,” he said.

Diedericks said he had been supplying vehicles and machinery for the past 15 years to certain departments.

“Approximately 95% of the work is done exclusively for the city,” he said.

He claimed the city had flagrantly breached and manipulated the procurement law to serve the ulterior purpose that none of the so-called big contractors would be successful in their respective bids.

Diedericks said the matter was raised with the new DA administration, but without success.

“This leaves a huge question mark about the integrity of the DA as well as statements made by the new mayor regarding tender fraud and corruption.”

He said tenders were still being awarded by the “corrupt ANC board” and that nothing had been done under the new administration to prevent such activities.

rapula.moatshe@inl.co.za

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