Loke: Heitech Padu gave lowest price

PUTRAJAYA: A RM185.07mil contract for the maintenance of the Road Transport Department’s (JPJ) MySikap website was awarded to Heitech Padu Bhd as the company’s bid is the lowest and most reasonable, the Transport Minister revealed.

Anthony Loke said a submission awarding the three-year contract to the firm for the amount without service tax was sent to the Finance Ministry by his ministry’s acquisition board last Dec 4 and was approved by the Treasury on Feb 2.

He said the status of the approval was confidential and the letter of acceptance was only issued by JPJ to Heitech Padu on April 5.

He dismissed claims by some quarters that the contract was given to the company as one of its major shareholders is Farhash Wafa Salvador, who is Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s former political secretary.

Loke said Farhash had bought 15.9% of the firm’s shares only on March 16 this year.

“This means he acquired the shares after the contract was awarded to the company on Feb 2 and not before it secured the project.

“As emphasised by the Prime Minister, after Farhash acquired the shares in the company, there has been no other government contract offered to Heitech Padu till this day,” he said in a press conference at the Transport Ministry here yesterday.

Loke said Anwar and the Cabinet viewed very seriously the insinuations by certain parties that the contract was awarded to Heitech Padu due to the prime minister’s close ties with Farhash.

“Farhash is no longer with the government and is not serving the government in any capacity.

“If there are parties who are still dissatisfied with this clarification, the Prime Minister welcomes them to lodge a report with the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission for a thorough investigation,’’ he added.

Loke disclosed that two other companies that met the technical and financial prerequisites had also vied for the contract with bids of RM186.8mil and RM199.5mil.

He said the ceiling price for the contract was RM207.3mil.

Asked why the contract was for a three-year term and not renewed annually, he said the cost would be much higher if that was the case.

“Usually, maintenance contracts are long term. This is a new contract and not an extension of contract. If it is an extension then it will be on a year-to-year basis,” he said.

Loke said the contract comprised two job scopes, namely MySikap and Mainframe.

He said while MySikap was an online feature offering various services such as vehicle registration, road tax and driving licence renewals, Mainframe provided servers to store data from MySikap.

Loke said in 2014, the Transport Ministry had decided to issue the contracts for MySikap and Mainframe separately through limited tendering.

However, he said in March last year, JPJ decided to merge both components to a single tender and for it to be collectively handled by a single company for enhanced monitoring and management.