By Stacy Carmichael-James
People’s Progressive Party General Secretary, Bharrat Jagdeo has leveled allegations against the Government, noting that if the tendering process does not yield the expected results they are cancelled and awarded to persons found favourable.
While the reports suggest that the People’s Progressive Party (PPP) during its time in office was single sourcing pharmaceuticals, Jagdeo is denying those claims noting that there were always public tenders for pre-qualification.
According to him, this can be justified by the Auditor General reports.
He said this Government goes out to tender several times and if the tender does not yield the results it wants, they are annulled. Jagdeo pointed to the cancellation of several tenders, among them GPHC procurement of medical supplies which was advertised on October 2, 2016 and GPHC procurement of pharmaceuticals advertised on November 6, 2016.
“So you deliberately create the shortage…there are several questions the Minister raised in her statement, she said several people have been delinquent (some of the suppliers) so tell the country who is delinquent, what are the names if you found people to be delinquent, you tell us who the delinquents are and how in the first place they got the contracts because they didn’t go through tender, ” Jagdeo said.
He is calling on the Public Health Minister to provide the names of those suppliers that provided substandard drugs and to list those substandard drugs.
According to Jagdeo, there is obviously a “whole layer” going on behind the scenes that the public is unaware of, therefore the answers to these questions are vital.
Public Health Minister, Volda Lawrence had approved over 600 million dollars worth of pharmaceuticals to be sole-sourced by ANSA MCAL, noting that it was an emergency situation. The Management of the GPHC had also been accused of deliberately creating an emergency situation in order to sole source drugs from the preferred supplier.
On this particular matter, the PPP General Secretary questioned how the Board decided on ANSA MCAL and how was it determined that any other supplier did not have the drugs or was it just a direction from Minister Lawrence to do this.
Jagdeo called for a complete investigation into the matter. He claimed that there is a massive cover-up on these issues.
