Appeal in airport bus tender deal

A Durban-based bus operator, disqualified from a city transport tender amid allegations of “collusive bidding”, has cried foul and approached the Durban High Court seeking a judicial review of the decision. Combined Transport Pty Ltd has denied any wrong-doing and says its price for the tender was the cheapest. It wants a judge to set aside the disqualification and direct city officials to score its tender. But the city is opposing the application. The bus transport is for airport and support service staff who used to work at the old airport in the south but now have to work at King Shaka International Airport in the north.

The city, as one of the many partners involved in the development of the new airport, buses staff between their old and new workplaces. It has now been given time to file its papers and then the matter will be set down on the court’s opposed roll. In his affidavit filed with the court, Combined Transport general manager Vickesh Maharaj said the company was an “associate company” of KZT Bus Services which also submitted a tender for the contract which was to run for three years, from April last year. Maharaj said the tender envisaged 48 trips to and from the airports every weekday and about the same number over two-day weekends. This amounted to more than 70 000km a month.

Maharaj said the tender was scored in two stages and had to get at least 70 out of 100 points in the first round before progressing to the next in which price constituted 90 percent of the score and broad-based economic empowerment 10 percent. However, both Combined Transport and KZT Bus Services were disqualified in the first round. Maharaj said he was informed that both companies were owned by Mr I Mangaroo and they had similar organo-grams and audit firms. They were told this did not “bid [sic] well for an independent bid determination”. The company appealed but lost, the appeals authority saying the provisions of the Competitions Act and the constitution outlawed “collusion” with another tenderer, and the tender documents submitted by the two companies could not be relied upon.

Maharaj said the two companies were separate entities, with their own employees and fleets of buses, although they were part of the same “group”. While the sole shareholder of Combined Transport was Ishwarlall Mangaroo, the I Mangaroo Family Trust was the shareholder of KZT. While Ishwarlall Mangaroo and his wife were trustees, they were not beneficiaries of the trust. Maharaj said he was the general manager of both and Mangaroo was the managing director of both. He said the two companies had submitted different tender prices – Combined Transport about R14 million and KZT about R17m – because they were “competitors” and had different fixed costs.

“There was no secrecy or collusion. We cannot be accused of bid rigging or collusive bidding. There was nothing sinister. “We remain in the dark regarding the alleged evidence uncovered by the city which suggests a misuse of the tender process,” he said. “The tender document did not prohibit a separate bid being made by a company within the same group. “We believe we have a good prospect of success if evaluated because our price was less than that of the company [eThekwini Bus Services] which got the contract.”