|
|
South Africa: Department Defends R500 Million Aids-Drugs Tender for Adcock
 |
 |
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
|
|
|||||||||
|
||||||||||
Business Day (Johannesburg)
3 July 2008
Posted to the web 3 July 2008
Luphert Chilwane
Johannesburg
THE health department has defended its awarding of a contract for the supply of antiretroviral drugs to Adcock-Ingram, a company which was recently fined for price fixing.
The department said there was no legal basis to exclude "competitive and reliable" companies such as Adcock from benefiting from its contracts because of their previous records.
The contract is worth more than R500m.
Adcock recently agreed to pay an administrative penalty of R53,502m, after it admitted to being part of a cartel operating in the medical market for the supply of intravenous medical products to hospitals.
Health d epartment spokesman Sibani Mngadi said six companies were awarded the contract to supply antiretroviral medicines.
"A significant amount of 66% was awarded to Aspen Pharmacare, while Adcock Ingram received only 12%. Our main consideration is a company's competitiveness in terms of price and reliability in supply."
He said antiretroviral programmes could not afford an interruption or shortfall in supply. Some products also had only one supplier.
"Adcock-Ingram was selected because it was one of the competitive companies in terms of price and supply reliability. The issue of the company being found guilty by the Competition Tribunal did not at all affect the process. We looked at the competitive prices the companies were offering."
Mngadi said the department was dealing with the price-fixing issue to establish the law regulating it.
He said as an example, the South African Medical Association was one of the bodies once found guilty by the Competition Commission, but the department still worked closely with it.
The Black Sash, an advocacy group, said yesterday it was not happy that the company had received a "huge" contract despite its admission of guilt.
It said yesterday it was unacceptable for companies found guilty of collusion to benefit from taxpayers' money in this way.
The organisation demanded to know the reasons for the awarding of the contract, and what the company had done to deserve it.
Nkosikhulule Nyembezi, Black Sash advocacy programme manager, said the organisation was disappointed with the awarding of such "profiteering" contracts to "unreliable" companies. In the Sash's view this was not only immoral but particularly serious and offensive when done at the expense of the poor and the sick.
Nyembezi said their impression was that the whole process of awarding tenders involved looking at the company's good corporate governance and transparency.
"We need to see what the company has done to deserve the contract. We are taking the issue up as we are currently preparing a letter to be submitted to the State Tender Board before the end of this week. We need to find out what are the basis, what extent did they take the decision to award the contract," Nyembezi said.
He said companies found guilty of price fixing should not benefit from government contracts and the government should not award tenders to those companies.
|
Tiger Brands spokesman Jimmy Manyi said "the best people to respond to the questions are the ones that awarded the tender".
What a helpful administration,they are helping people make more money so they can pay the imposed fine?
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Copyright © 2008 Business Day. All rights reserved. Distributed by AllAfrica Global Media (allAfrica.com). To contact the copyright holder directly for corrections -- or for permission to republish or make other authorized use of this material, click here. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Make allAfrica.com your home page | RSS Feed | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top | Site Guide | Who We Are | Advertising | Search | Subscribe | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Questions or Comments? Contact us. Read our Privacy Statement. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
