Govt invites controversy with Islamabad Airport privatisation

The federal government has reportedly rejected a competitive bidder and awarded Islamabad International Airport to a preferred foreign company.

This is the first airport privatization made possible by the IMF’s new $7 billion credit package.

The sidelined consortium’s representative, Danish Janjua, argued that they were unfairly excluded from the bidding process.

They dispute that, despite their timely arrival for tender submissions, they were misinformed and told that the submission period had ended five minutes after the deadline.

The group spent a month putting together their bid and invested Rs1.5 billion to be eligible.

The consortium emphasized that its representatives came punctually and that PAA’s activities were a purposeful postponement, seemingly intended to hinder the consortium’s ability to bid under the pretense of delayed arrival.

This behavior betrays a lack of sincerity and casts doubt on the integrity of the procurement procedure.

Deliberately impeding the procedure to create a non-competitive process and favoring the other bidder gives the impression of a planned attempt to exclude the consortium, the statement read.

The consortium said that by instigating the delay and subsequently utilizing a technicality to rationalize the exclusion, PAA undermined the impartiality and openness that are fundamental to public procurement, raising questions about the validity of its actions and the reliability of the bidding procedure.