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Canadian Blue Fox co. trapped in
bureaucracy in Iraqi Kurdistan 8.6.2012
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June
8, 2012
SULAIMANIYAH,
Kurdistan region 'Iraq', — A Canadian company
has filed a complaint against the former Ministry of
Municipalities for the mismanagement of a tender.
The company filed the complaint in 2006 in the
Sulaimaniyah court, but the court has not yet
responded.
The complaint emerges from a project that the
company won in two tenders but was never given.
Instead, it was given to another company for more
money than the Canadian company had asked for.
The story begins in 2004, when a project to design
master plans for the cities of Kalar, Chamchamal and
Raniya was put to a bid. In the bidding, the
Canadian company Blue Fox won the project. But as a
representative of the company says, the project was
never given to them.
A committee from the Reconstruction Projects Office,
the Sulaimaniyah municipality, the Ministry of
Municipalities and an expert of master plan design
from Baghdad University was formed to assess Blue
Fox’s tenders. The committee, in a 40-page report,
concluded that the tenders were valid.
Niyazi Hamid Ibrahim, a civil engineer and
representative of the Blue Fox company in Kurdistan,
who has hundreds of pages of documents about the
tender, says, “Our company was supposed to design
the Sulaimaniyah , Kalar, Chamchamal and Raniya city
master plans. There were two tenders [one for
Sulaimaniyah master plan, the other for the other
cities]. We bid on both and won both tenders. We won
because, as the assessment of the committee and the
Baghdad University professor concluded, our company
offered better tenders than the rest of the
participating companies.”
The story, indeed, is a long one. The bidding took
place on March 15, 2004. Blue Fox paid $2,000 to
participate in the bidding, and a $100,000 deposit.
Later, the American UEB assessed the company in four
phases,www.ekurd.net
for which the company paid $25,000 for each phase.
The assessments were completed on May 22, 2004, at
which point Blue Fox submitted a report to the
Reconstruction Projects Office. The report was
approved by then Prime Minister Barham Salih. In two
letters in June 2004, the Reconstruction Projects
Office asked the Ministry of Municipalities to go
ahead and sign the project tenders with Blue Fox. In
July 2004, then Minister of Municipalities Fatih
Abdulla sent a letter to the Sulaimaniyah
municipality giving the green light for the
contracts to be signed.
The Sulaimaniyah municipality, which was directed by
Qadir Hama Jan at the time, sent a letter in July
2004 to Blue Fox Company’s representative and
advised the representative to have company staff
appear at Sulaimaniyah municipality within five days
to sign the contracts.
Ibrahim says that because the process had already
gone on for so long, the company’s staff was in
Canada. Although they returned to Kurdistan,
problems with the contract began which resulted in
staff going back and forth between different
government agencies. “We would go to the ministry
and they would tell us the ‘municipality has some
concerns.’ We would go to the municipality and they
would tell us the ‘ministry does not agree on the
contracts to be signed.’”
“This whole thing brought shame on the Kurds,”
Ibrahim says. He says requests were made for things
not mentioned in the tenders, such as cars for the
supervising committee, which the company complied
with though the contract remained unsigned. During
this period, Blue Fox opened an office and spent a
lot of money. They sent several letters to the
Ministry of Municipalities and the Council of
Ministers, and even two letters to Jalal Talabani,
the president of Iraq and leader of the Patriotic
Union of Kurdistan (PUK) but received no answers.
Then a power shift happened in Kurdistan. Omar Fatah
became the prime minister. Ibrahim says, “This made
our problem more difficult. I do not know if Mr.
Fatah couldn’t understand the issue or what. He
might have understood it in a different way.”
Fatah referred the case back to the Ministry of
Municipalities in August 2004. Blue Fox visited the
Ministry of Municipalities on several occasions, but
did not receive any answers. Ibrahim says, “After
this, we sent a letter to Jalal Talabani. Talabani
wrote on the letter ‘solve this problem.’ I took the
letter to the prime minister. Mr. Fatah promised he
would order the Ministry of Municipalities and
Sulaimaniyah municipality to sign the contract. But
they never did.”
Finally, the company was told that the prime
minister believed the prices in the tender were too
high, and the company needed to lower the price by 5
percent. Ibrahim says, “Our price for the three
cities was $973,000, and the one for Sulaimaniyah
was $130,000. In the end, we agreed to the 5 percent
discount because we had spent so much money by that
time. After all this, they still refused to sign the
contract.”
In February 2005, the project was submitted for a
new bidding. Blue Fox participated in the bidding
and won the tenders again.
Ibrahim says, “I wish we had not won the project
again. This time I was psychologically ruined. I was
embarrassed. I had brought a Canadian company and
told them Kurdistan was a developed region and ruled
by a democracy, yet we had won a tender for the
second time and no one was answering us. It was
indeed an embarrassing thing for me.”
Once again, Blue Fox was not given the project,
though they had won it for US$1.1 million. Suddenly,
and without tenders or bidding, Zublin, a German
company, got the project.
Ibrahim says, “The project was given to this other
company without any legal mechanism. The German
company specializes in dam construction and has no
experience in master plan design. Their field is a
completely different one. As the saying goes, ‘as
different as chalk and cheese.’”
He added, “They told us our price was too high, but
they contracted the German company for US$5.5
million for the Sulaimaniyah city master plan
alone!”
A Zublin company representative, Bayar Muhammad,
told the Awene newspaper in March 2006 that the
company got the project without a tender. But in
March 2007, the newspaper Kurdistani Nwe published
an article that announced the Kurdistan Council of
Ministers had decided to take the Sulaimaniyah
master plan project from Zublin and give it to IGCO.
Ibrahim says that this time, too, the new company
was given the project without a tender. “As far as I
know, Zublin gave a down payment for the project.
But, as for us, even though we rightfully got the
project, we received no down payment. The other
company, which was given the project finally,
completed the project in 2012. The project has been
completed with many shortcomings.”
Omar Mahwi, chairman of the Sulaimaniyah
Municipality Council, denies that there are any
shortcomings in the completed master plan. The
reason for the delay of the project, says Mahwi, was
lack of experience by local companies in the field.
“This was a first experiment in Iraq. We tackled the
master plan issue too early. That is why the project
faced so many challenges,” says Mahwi.
Mahwi was a member of the Blue Fox’s tender
committee in 2004. Regarding the reasons Blue Fox
was not given the contract, Mahwi says, “I cannot
remember the reasons. But whatever the reasons, that
issue is in past now.”
The issue is not over for Blue Fox. Ibrahim says
that, at the beginning of 2006, his company filed a
complaint against the Ministry of Municipalities.
“But up until today, the court has not summoned
anyone for this case. We have visited [the court] on
several occasions. Now we do not know what has
happened to the documents and the files of the
complaint.”
The court has only shown Blue Fox a response from
the Ministry of Municipalities where it claims the
bidding did not take place within their ministry.
Ibrahim says, “The question is, if the Ministry of
Municipalities does not have the documents for such
a bid, who does?”
The Blue Fox representative believes that the
situation led to this either due to ignorance or
deliberately.
“A master plan is like a constitution for a city,”
he says. “If you have a bad constitution, you will
ruin that city. Sulaimaniyah has been run by a
tribal system for so many years. Most of the land of
the city were distributed to people based on
privileges. A master plan could prevent such
arbitrary distribution. The problems were created
for [our] master plan mainly because of the latter.”
By Slam Saadi, Rudaw
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author or news agency,
rudaw.net
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