The crackdown on the corrupt system in the digital sector and the elimination of the National Agency for Information Technology (NAI) has begun to yield positive results for taxpayers. For the first time, a tender in information technology has been won with significant savings of public money.
This is a contract for the installation of electronic gates at the Port of Durres and Vlora. The tender for the installation of e-gates at the two most important ports in the country was conducted by the Centralized Purchasing Operator. The limit fund of this tender was set at 137 million lek or 1.43 million euros.
Seven companies or mergers of companies participated in the competition, and the preliminary winner of the contract was the merger of the companies Albascan and Image & Communications Development with a bid of 100 million lek or 37 percent of the limit fund.
Albascan is the company involved in the smart labs tender scandal and its owner Elison Jorgjis is under indictment by SPAK for corruption and money laundering. But most of the IT market in Albania is already mired in corruption and it will take a long time for the market to be cleaned up.
On the other hand, the submission of 7 bids in a tender in the digital sector constitutes another record. Generally, NAKSHI tenders were conducted with two participating bids, where one in most cases was fictitious, and were always won at the head of the limit fund.
But with the dissolution of the AKSHI and the transfer of IT tenders to the Centralized Purchasing Operator, it seems that the music has changed.
However, returning public contracts in the digital sector to their real cost will require much more than that. All IT tenders have been programmed in the NAKSHI budget for this year and the allocated funds are significantly above the real costs, two to three times, as SPAK files have proven.
Therefore, the Centralized Purchasing Operator will have to review some of them or reopen market tests by requesting preliminary offers from all companies and not from a closed system as was the case in AKSHI.
Editorial
