Chronology Of How EC Orchestrated To Have Least Qualified Thales Win Biometric Bid …courtesy, IMANI

Following revelations by IMANI, that the Electoral Commission, cherry-picked scandal-prone French company, Thales, in a sham tender for a contract to provide a new biometric solution for Ghana, the policy think tank has released a chronology of how the EC orchestrated the whole plot.

The plot which is a simple sequencing of events show how the EC Chairperson and her two deputies set aside the recommendations of an original tender Committee and eventually dissolved it when the committee members refused to be a part of the fraud.

Mrs. Jean Mensah would then go on to put together her own Tender Committee, said to be made up of lackeys, and then tele-guide it into reaching conclusion that Thales, whose track record includes being blacklisted by the World Bank, won the bid.

“We say that the EC from the outset wanted Thales (and its local partner, Rhema) to win the tender. The “international competitive tender” was thus anything but “competitive”. The outcome had been set in advance,” IMANI wrote in an update.

This update comes after a press conference in which IMANI showed that Mrs. Jean Mensah and her two deputies had acted together to vandalize procurement rules in favor of Thales.

“After the original Technical Evaluation Panel finished its work on the shortlist of five companies and presented the recommendations to the EC’s management (essentially, the Chairperson and two deputies), the Chairperson wrote back on 18th December 2019 asking that the two most experienced companies in biometric elections technology, who also posed the greatest threat to Thales, be dropped and a new report confirming same be delivered on the next day. The 2 companies are Idemia and Smartmatic. And that Thales and the two least experienced companies, Miru and Buck Press, be advanced to the financial evaluation phase.

“When this was not done, the EC management, having failed to prevail on the Chairman of the Technical Evaluation Panel, still went ahead and modified the score tallies to achieve their preferred outcome. This outcome was communicated to the Central Tender Review Committee (CTRC) and the Public Procurement Authority (PPA) as the final outcome of the technical evaluation phase for rubber-stamping. The EC then went ahead and opened the financial offers.

“The Chairman of the Technical Evaluation Panel thus wrote to the CTRC and the PPA disowning the report and dissociating himself from its claims. The EC Chairs responded by dissolving the technical panel on 10th January 2020 and set up a rubberstamp new committee on the same day.

“At its first sitting on 13th January, this committee eliminated Idemia from further consideration,” IMANI wrote.

The Think tank points out that Idemia traces its roots to Sagem, the company that won Ghana’s first biometric ID card tender under President Kufuor, and makes the famous Morpho tablets and the most cost-competitive BVR solution that they found after a pricing survey. However, Jen Mensah still got them disqualified.

After the first Technical panel was fired by Jean Mensah, IMANI writes, the new Technical Panel then went ahead to rubberstamp Thales as winner of the tender under claims that nothing adverse was found against it. While doing this, the same panel used trumped up charges the Philippines to disqualify Smartmatic, one of the more qualified companies.

“By failing to deduct marks in section 5 against Thales for all the reputational issues they’ve faced around the world, a feat only achievable by dropping due diligence, background searches, and reputational risk completely from the evaluation, they managed to score Thales (on page 43 of the final report) 104  (though their marks added up to 98) and thereby successfully eliminated Smartmatic, which had bid at a lower price than Thales. This is despite Smartmatic having 21 successful major similar deployments to their credit compared with Thales’ 7 (or, for the purpose of this tender evaluation, just 4). And despite Thales having been blacklisted in the past by the World Bank, having been indicted for bribing Government officials in South Africa, and  through its Gemalto unit facing suits by the government of Estonia for delivering malfunctioning technology.

“The Central Tender Review Committee used a few hours to rubberstamp this whole mess on 24th January 2020,” IMANI wrote.

Interestingly, Thales’ Gemalto unit was in 2016 virtually blacklisted after it failed to deliver on a GoG contract to fit equipment at the Kotoka International Airport.