Bangladesh: Cabinet body okays new provision for unsolicited offer on PPP projects

Dhaka, July 7, 2014 (New Age): The cabinet’s economic affair committee on Sunday gave its approval in principle to a new provision for entertaining unsolicited offer from the private sector to implement different projects under public-private partnership. A meeting of the committee, with finance minister AMA Muhith in the chair, gave its nod to the proposal placed by the Prime Minister’s Office for introducing the new provision on PPP projects. The PPP Office, under the PMO, prepared the proposal titled ‘The Procedure for Implementation of PPP Policy and Strategy for Unsolicited Proposals 2014’. The proposed new provision includes two systems — Bonus System and Swiss Challenge System — for entertaining private party’s unsolicited offer for PPP projects. In the Bonus System, the proponent of the unsolicited proposal is given bonus points in relation to its evaluation while the Swiss Challenge System enables the government to attract counter proposal on unsolicited proposal during a designated period. The original proponent then has the right to counter-match the most attractive counterproposal. The government has been struggling for long to implement various infrastructure projects under PPP. Every year, a significant amount of fund — Tk 3,000 crore — is allocated in the PPP for implementation of infrastructure projects. A number of rules and regulations were promulgated on different occasions to attract PPP proposals. But, so far success is very insignificant. In some cases, the officials said, they receive ‘unsolicited offer’ from different international companies to implement large-scale infrastructure projects. But they could not entertain the ‘unsolicited offers’ for lack of any specific method to deal with such project. Against this backdrop, the officials said the government made the move to introduce the new provision. They said that under the provision, the Bonus Point System will be applicable for the large and medium projects while both the Bonus and Swiss Challenge Systems could be applied for small projects. In the Bonus System, the sponsor of the unsolicited offer has to submit a detailed proposal for a project along with a feasibility study report. If the project is found viable and feasible in the evaluation of the PPP Office, the sponsor company will be asked to submit his detailed proposal for the project through an open tender and face a competition from other bidders. In this case, while all the bidders’ proposals are evaluated, the unsolicited bidder will get bonus point at 7 per cent as an initiator of the original project. In the Swiss Challenge System, when unsolicited bidder’s offer is not found to be the first lowest, it will be given a further chance to submit a revised proposal within 30 days to match the first lowest bidder’s proposal. Official sources said that under the new provision, the line ministry will receive unsolicited proposal from private sector and then put it forward to the PPP office.