Pakistan Tender Award Faces Multiple Legal Challenges in High Court

The Pakistan tender award for a tax stamp, electronic monitoring and track and trace system for tobacco products (announced in last month’s Tax Stamp & Traceability News™), has been challenged in the Islamabad and Karachi high courts, with a number of bidders filing formal complaints with regard to the allegedly spurious manner in which their bids were evaluated.

Initially, the evaluation process had been based on an 80-point scheme, of which 70 points applied to the technical qualifications of each bid.

But then, one week before the tender closed, a lobbying meeting took place between Pakistan’s Federal Board of Revenue (FBR) and the tobacco industry. Following this meeting, the FBR modified the evaluation process by replacing the technical part of the points scheme with a simple yes/no mechanism, together with a final decision-making step that was based purely on price, thereby effectively shifting the emphasis away from technical qualification and onto price.