A THOROUGH vetting of the companies bidding for public projects could be more effective than an upfront bond payment in plugging the loopholes and weaknesses in the tender award process, said Azam Baki.

The Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) chief recommended that government agencies perform a background check on the bidders to ensure the companies are genuine and and have competency to undertake the contract for which they are bidding.

He said the company’s financial position should also be vetted. Most important of all, it must be determined whether the companies are registered.

“They must be genuine companies that are qualified to bid for public contracts,” he said in an interview on TV AlHijrah’s Analisis programme yesterday night.

The Works Ministry recently announced a new policy requiring bidders to pay a RM500,000 bond when making a bid for government projects. This came in the wake of allegations that the contracts were monopolised by a group of companies known as “Project Cartel”.

Azam said because vetting was now lax, dubious entities were bidding for government jobs.

He said the documents the companies submitted with their bids were also not verified and only consulted when the contract ran into problems later.

The MACC chief said graft watchdogs had been inundated with “many complaints” that companies were awarded jobs for which they had zero competency.

He said there had been instances of companies handing over supporting documents that had turned out to be fake.

On incompetency, Azam cited the example of a company that was awarded the contract to build a coronavirus laboratory.

He questioned how such a key project could be awarded to a company that has no competency in doing work related to medical or pharmaceutical.

“These are issues that heads of departments and ministries should look into. Do the companies have the expertise and competency for the job?

“When issues crop up and a check is made, then they find such things as documents tendered are fakes. By then this is too late.”

Azam said it might not be possible to eliminate corruption totally but it is possible to reduce them.

 One suggestion he has is to make infringement of the beneficial ownership (BO) declaration in a company a criminal offence.

The law, Azam said is already in the books under the Companies Act but failure to make that declaration is not a criminal offence.

Under the BO law, companies are required to inform the Companies Commission of Malaysia (SSM) who are the people behind the company, the legal owners and those who have interests when bidding for the public project.

Azam said in a proposal MACC will make to the Special Cabinet Committee on Anti-Corruption “in a few months”, failure to declare the legal ownership and all who have interests in the company, including those not declared in the company forms, would be a criminal offence.

“We are proposing to criminalize those who do not declare their interests.”

 Azam believes that the project cartel cases can be reduced with the introduction of the law. – April 15, 2021.