Africa-Press – South-Africa. Eskom is to seek leave to appeal an order by a court last month that ruled it must go back to the drawing board on its R16 billion tender for boiler maintenance after one of the bidders was disqualified.
The court gave Eskom six months to run a new process, during which time the winning bidders would continue to service Eskom to avoid a disruption.
The initial application was brought by Babcock Ntuthuko Engineering, one of three companies that have serviced Eskom’s coal-fired power stations since 2016. A new tender process was begun in 2019 and finalised in October last year. However, Babcock was disqualified for failing to include an ISO 38234 welding certificate in the documentation for the bid.
The contract was split between the other two bidders Actom and Steinmuller.
In October, Babcock took Eskom to court and successfully argued that the tender documents had been ambiguous, and it wasn’t clear that an actual copy of the certificate was required. Babcock also argued that as it was already an Eskom service provider, the power utility had the ISO 3834 certificate in its possession.
In finding in Babcock’s favour the North Gauteng High Court in Pretoria stressed that there was no evidence of wrongdoing.
Eskom has requested access to the Supreme Court of Appeal, arguing that the tender documents were not ambiguous and other bidders understood clearly the need to submit the certificate. In its papers Eskom says:
Eskom also says that the court’s decision to allow six months for rerunning the process was unrealistic and that it had specified at the time that this would take a minimum of 22 months to redo.
Eskom wants the high court ruling overturned and costs awarded against Babcock.
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