5 foreign cos interested

Five foreign power companies yesterday submitted their documents to qualify for the 360megawatt Haripur gas-fired power project under the Electricity Generation Company of Bangladesh.
The five companies are: Sumitomo along with Gsenc from Japan, Marubeni Corporation from Japan, Guang Dong from China, Cobra from Spain and Ensaldo from Italy.
In January, when the EGCB started selling the document outlining criterion, terms and conditions to pre-qualify for this tender, around a dozen foreign companies purchased the document.
Since the EGCB gave only 40 days for prospective bidders to submit their pre-qualification documents, most bidders wanted to extend the time. Even though the EGCB was convinced about the necessity to extend the deadline, the project's financier Japan International Cooperation Agency (Jica) declined.
As a result, only five companies showed up to file their documents on the last date of submission yesterday.
Sources claim that the pre-qualification document for this Tk 1,665 crore project was manipulated to favour one particular company. The EGCB had prepared the pre-qualification document in October. Then under outside influence, the document was modified in such a way that they do not match other standard pre-qualification documents used in the country.
Sources said the EGCB's pre-qualification document is allowing bids with power generators that do not have any proven record of performance. There is no precedence of allowing the use of such generators in Bangladesh.
Besides, the EGCB has broadened the range of power generators for bidders. Usually bidders were asked to offer power generators with 10 percent plus or minus of the asked capacity (in this case 10 percent plus or minus of 360MW). But the EGCB increased the range to 15 percent.
This means a bidder can offer power generators of around 300MW or 410MW in this tender. Sources said only one company, which has developed a new-generation power generator but has no proven record for the generator's performance, meets this criterion.