South African highspeed rail project, Gautrain, has issued a response to what it claims were “incorrect allegations by the [South African] Sunday Times”.
In an article the paper alleged that the winning group, the Bombela Consortium, was responsible for pushing up the cost of the scheme. Gautrain said this was: “Totally incorrect and a gross distortion of a highly complex public-private partnership process which has taken more than three years to conclude.”
The paper said it has access to confidential minutes. From these it concluded that only Bombela was responsible for putting pressure on the province to increase the estimation of the public sector comparator (PSC) reference index, which would make a high bid for the project appear to be more conforming. Gautrain said that if the paper had access to the full range of documents for both bidders it would not have: “Made its one-sided, ill-informed conclusions and would not have misrepresented the bidding process so inaccurately.”
Gautrain said that after receiving the Bombela and Gauliwe (the other bidding consortium) bids it became apparent that the bids were too high and the PSC too low. The competition between the two bidders was to produce a bid that gave: the best technical solution, had the soundest financial structure, met or bettered requirements for socio economic development of the region, gave the lowest operating cost during the 15 year concession, exposed the province to lowest possible yearly contingent liability and, finally, the lowest overall cost. Base cost is an over-simplification of a complex process with several weighted evaluation criteria.
Allegations by the paper that the Gautrain Project Team only had interactions with Bombela or that deadlines were extended to favour Bombela were described as “preposterous”.
