Daily Trust
The federal government is set to award a service boat monitoring agent contract for another 25 years to the Integrated Logistics Services Limited (INTELS) despite being disqualified in the bid process, investigations by Daily Trust revealed.
The contract between the Nigerian Ports Authority (NPA) and INTELS for providing the authority with the service for monitoring boats expired in August 2020. The contract which commenced in 2007 lasted for 13 years.
The NPA is one of the major sources of revenue for the federal government, a development that attracts attention and interest from investors and other stakeholders.
Documents indicating revenue generated by the NPA on service boat operations as sighted by this newspaper indicated that between 2017 and 2019, the Onne pilotage delivered N98.2billion (240 million USD).
The Warri pilotage area generated N116.3 billion ($284 million) between 2014 and 2018, while the Calabar pilotage area brought in N644.5 million ($1.6 million).
Daily Trust investigation had earlier revealed that the federal government lost over N58 billion as the average of what would have accrued to the federation from the contract of service boat operations monitoring agents in four pilot districts in the last year.
In line with the Public Procurement Act, The NPA in December 2019 initiated a public tender to engage a company to provide the service at four pilotage districts.
In the tender document sighted by our reporters, the NPA reduced the commission due to the agents from 28 per cent of all revenues collected to 15 per cent. During the active period of its contract, INTELS was collecting 28 per cent of total accruals as agency commission.
But the NPA was not comfortable with this arrangement, a development which among other issues pitched it against INTELS.
The NPA noted that the reduction of the commission was to maximise revenue going to the authority and in turn the federal government, in addition to keeping with best practices for agency commissions of such services which were typically not above 15 per cent.
INTELS and others submitted their bids to qualify for the tender. The NPA in a letter to President Muhammadu Buhari noted that INTELS violated one of the criteria advertised and was disqualified.
The tender process continued and four companies with the highest scores pre-qualified.
The four companies selected out of the 32 that applied to man the four pilotage districts were; Pacific Silverline Ltd. (Warri district), Isasha Investment Ltd (Calabar), ICA Logistics Ltd (Lagos) and Nexttee Oil & Gas Trading Company Ltd. (Onne/Port Harcourt).
Daily Trust had last month reported that the four companies were yet to be issued with letters of engagement as a result of horse-trading and legal battles, making government lose billions of naira…
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