Company A, which participated in the bidding to be the Cultural Affairs Bureau’s (IC) newspaper supplier of its public libraries from 2021 to 2023, appealed to the Court of Final Appeal (TUI) as Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture Elsie Ao Ieong U did not award the project to Company A even though it had offered an “extraordinarily low price” per newspaper, a TUI statement said yesterday.
The statement said that Company A handed in a bid that satisfied all the criteria, and the overall scoring on the grading scale was higher than all the other bidders. The statement pointed that each bid was evaluated based on three main criteria – pricing, supply quantity and delivery time. The statement underlined that Company A scored the highest on pricing because it was offering to supply the bureau the newspapers for 0.01 pataca each. In other words, the statement added, Company A used an extremely low price to gain an “absolute” advantage in the pricing criteria. However, the statement also noted that the Company A’s overall bid was not the lowest.
According to the statement, Company A was not happy with the bidding results so it appealed to the Court of Second Instance (TSI) but that court dismissed its appeal due to public interest.
Company A was still dissatisfied with the ruling and appealed to the Court of Final Appeal, using the reason that the bureau violated the bidding regulation as it did not award the bidder that scored highest on the three criteria to be the supplier of newspapers to the public libraries.
The TSI panel said in the statement that according to the regulations, the bidder who scored the highest on three criteria should be awarded the project. However, the statement added, Company A used an extremely low price, 0.01 patacas, to score extremely high on the “pricing” criteria. However, it was an “unreasonable” situation, even though among the three criteria, the “pricing” weight was 55 percent of the total score, it is not the major factor that affected the decision.
The statement noted that as the overall bid that Company A submitted was the highest amongst all the bidders, despite its cost for each newspaper supplied being the lowest. Therefore, the statement underlined, due to public interest, Company A was not awarded the project.
The TUI panel agreed that in order to optimise the spending of public funds, the decision against awarding Company A was valid and was “not unreasonable”, as the Secretary for Social Affairs and Culture could freely decide whether to award the project to Company A if the latter thought it could affect public interest.
As a result, the statement underlined, Company A lost its appeal.
