On 12 February, the Astana Asset and Public Procurement Management Department published a tender on the public procurement portal for the construction of 26 traffic light installations worth over 2.1 billion tenge.
The editorial team at FBRK decided to analyse the technical documentation of the procurement and discovered a number of notable features that certainly deserve public attention.
The first thing that immediately stands out is the specification of specific equipment models with detailed technical characteristics in the technical specification for the lot.
Among these are: traffic lights with the Futurled optical system, SPOT modules with a CPU64 board, PowerFlow-2 industrial switches, TI BPL2 interface boards, Click111 and Click 222 modules, TrafiOne video detectors, and other specialised equipment. The total cost of the contractor's supply equipment alone amounts to over 713 million tenge.
Of particular note is the fact that many of the items specified in the documentation have highly specialised technical characteristics, which could significantly limit the pool of potential suppliers.
In the region, dealership rights for the supply of a significant portion of the required equipment belong to a single company – SMEU-Astana LLP, which our editorial team has already written about on several occasions previously.
It is also noteworthy that the working designs were approved by a number of organisations, including the Department of Architecture, the Department of Transport, Astanagenplan LLP, Astana-REC JSC, and SMEU-Astana LLP itself.
The tender documentation was prepared by Scientific and Technical Centre New Projects LLP, which between 2011 and 2017 was owned by the foreign company Midagi Holdings Limited. This same company was a founder of SMEU-Astana LLP between 2011 and 2019.
According to data from the kompra.kz service, in 2019 the founder of Scientific and Technical Centre New Projects LLP became GIG Global Integration Group GmbH LLC, which currently owns SMEU-Astana LLP.
Currently, the head of Scientific and Technical Centre New Projects LLP is Olga Bashmakova, and the sole founder is the company Citymobility OU.
An analysis of public procurement history reveals an interesting pattern: Scientific and Technical Centre New Projects LLP and SMEU-Astana LLP regularly appear in the same projects, where the first company often acts as the developer of technical documentation, and the second as the work contractor. This practice can be observed across a number of tenders for transport infrastructure.
In light of recent calls for the optimisation of government spending, the expert community will likely be interested in analysing the pricing stated in the project.
At the time of publication, no bids had been submitted for the tender, which may indicate the specificity of the tender's technical requirements.
To remind readers, last November the FBRK editorial team analysed, how the cost of traffic light maintenance contracts in Kosshy changed. We also reported on the general increase in spending on road infrastructure in Kazakhstan.