Chinese company fails with bid to stop N$237m tender

A Chinese company that submitted an unsuccessful tender bid for the construction of a new head office for the Namibia Financial Institutions Supervisory Authority (Namfisa) has failed with an attempt to get a court interdict to stop the award of the building contract to a rival bidder.

The application for an interdict that a joint venture between the companies Zhong Mei Engineering Group and Palladium Civil Engineering filed three weeks ago was turned down by acting judge Collins Parker in the Windhoek High Court yesterday.

Parker concluded that the joint venture did not provide the court with proof of a decision of the Central Procurement Board of Namibia (CPBN) Review Panel which it said it wanted to ask the court to review, after obtaining an interdict to stop the signing of a construction contract between the CPBN and a rival joint venture.

“I would say the present urgent application is merely brought to postpone the funeral of the applicant [Zhong Mei Engineering Group joint venture with Palladium Civil Engineering] and to prevent the carrying out of a government project,” Parker commented in the reasons for his decision.

The CPBN notified bidders in a tender for the construction of a head office for Namfisa near the end of November last year that it has chosen

a joint venture between the company China State Construction Engineering Corporation and the close corporation Adaptive Building Land Construction as successful bidder for the construction project.

The CPBN received 13 tender bids for the Namfisa head office construction project.

Eight of those bids were disqualified for not complying with tender requirements.

The Adaptive Building Land Construction CC and China State Construction Engineering Corporation joint venture submitted a bid price of N$236,8 million to the CPBN, which was the lowest of the five bids that were not disqualified.

Palladium Civil Engineering shareholder Immanuel Uugwanga informed the court in an affidavit that his company’s joint venture with Zhong Mei Engineering Group submitted a bid in an amount of N$215,6 million.

The CPBN decided to disqualify their bid because it was informed that a tax good standing certificate submitted by Zhong Mei had been revoked by the Namibia Revenue Agency (Namra), as it had been issued unprocedurally.

In his affidavit, Uugwanga said Palladium and Zhong Mei applied to the CPBN Review Panel to have the decision to disqualify their bid reviewed, but the panel refused on 19 January to hear their application, as according to the panel that application had been filed prematurely in December last year.

The joint venture between Adaptive Building Land Construction CC and China State Construction Engineering Corporation alleged that the urgent court application of Zhong Mei and Palladium was also premature, as it was filed without a written decision of the Review Panel – being the decision that they wanted the court to review later – having been provided to them or in turn filed at the court.

Zhong Mei Engineering Group, which has received several large construction contracts in Namibia, was also on the losing side in a case in the Windhoek High Court in August last year, after the company tried to challenge Namra’s seizure of N$33 million from its bank account in July last year.

According to Namra, the company submitted tax returns showing it was paying no corporate taxes in Namibia from the time of its registration in 2013 to the end of August 2018.

However, during that period, the company was actively trading and was awarded contracts for various government projects that generated about N$926,5 million in revenue for the company, Namra stated in documents filed at the court.

According to the tax agency, it calculated that over the three years from the start of October 2015 to the end of September 2018, Zhong Mei should have paid a total amount of N$33 million in tax.