Bagatelle water contract challenge ends in record gap

PORT LOUIS, Mauritius. Sotravic and Biwater filed a procurement challenge on May 14, 2014, over the Bagatelle Water Treatment Plant contract. The public record of that challenge is truncated, and its outcome remains unresolved. The available document cuts off before the Independent Review Panel states any findings. The Central Water Authority supplied only one paragraph defending its award to a competing joint venture. Nothing in the text shows the panel dismissed the objections on their merits. The record breaks off mid-sentence. That gap matters for the local procurement debate. There is no basis in the surviving record to conclude the authority's handling of the award was validated. The authority produced no documents showing every member of the winning venture held the mandatory ten-year construction experience. Its brief reply also omitted the technical scoring sheets and site visit records needed to confirm a proper design reliability assessment took place. Meanwhile, the tender criteria ranked plant reliability and design quality above cost. The authority gave no explanation for accepting a low bid under those rules. Its defense never addressed the original Rs1.4 billion internal estimate, leaving the abnormally low price objection unanswered. The May filing shows Sotravic pressing for strict accountability in public infrastructure procurement. The incomplete record leaves the authority's evaluation process untested. Without verified experience data and technical matrices, claims of a transparent contract award remain unsupported. The file stays open pending a complete record of the panel's findings. Whether the authority will ever release the full evaluation documents remains the open question.