The Infrastructure Development Office (GDI) announced in a statement yesterday that it has decided to relaunch its public tender for the construction of the Seac Pai Van section of the Light Rail Transit (LRT), as all 10 construction companies proposed quotations and construction periods that were “obviously lower than the reasonable levels” in the respective bids they submitted last year.
The office invited bids for the project in late July last year, for which 10 companies submitted their respective bids, which were unsealed by the office in early September. All bids were accepted at that time.
According to GDI’s announcement in September last year, the quotations proposed by the 10 bidders ranged from 896 million patacas to 975 million patacas.
According to September’s GDI statement, the office had set a maximum period of 960 working days for the winning bidder to complete the project.
According to September’s GDI statement, the construction periods proposed by the 10 bidders ranged from 490 to 820 working days.
Yesterday’s statement said that after assessing the 10 bids, GDI officials concluded that the proposed quotations and construction periods were “obviously too low”.
The statement said that based on previous experiences, the office has concluded that if the project’s construction contract had been granted to any of the 10 bidders, it was likely that it would have resulted in “serious” budget overruns and construction delays.
Consequently, the statement said, the government has decided to cancel last year’s bids “in the public interest”, as the construction periods proposed by the 10 bidders were “extremely unreasonably [short]”.
The statement said that the office will relaunch a public tender for the project “soon”.
