Cartels involved in a multi-billion shillings tenders at Kenya Ports Authority are out to control a lucrative fuel supply where the name Abu Joho, the billionaire brother of Mombasa governor Hassan Joho features prominently.
This is emerging after 16 firms among them, leading oil marketing companies such as Shell, Vivo, Total, Ola among others, put in their tenders for supply of fuel to KPA. The current tender is with National Oil, a state owned parastatal. Abu as the elder Joho, as is commonly referred to has been boasting in public that already, the tender is his and relevant banking institutions are fighting to finance it.
A source well versed with the tender revealed that only three firms that are not oil marketing companies have qualified the technical evaluation. An engineer at KPA who also runs a private office at Joho family business establishment Anderson Mutalaki was instrumental in divulging tender to favour Oxford Oils, Danka and Insignia all operated by the same cartel but different directors.
According to our source who is a member of the technical committee evaluating the tenders that talked to us in confidentiality, the three little known firms have been evaluated positively and qualified for the next stage of evaluation.
The irony of the matter is that these three firms do not have oil marketing licences as required by the ministry of Energy nor do they have the capacity and experience to perform.
The tender was advertised in September this year on the KPA website and the initial closing date was supposed to be on October 24 2019 but the closing date was postponed twice. The first one was to be November 7 and eventually later on November 21 2019.
According to the committee member, this was to enable the firm obtain some crucial documents related to the provisions provided keeping in mind that they were lacking.
Weekly Citizen could not establish if the said tender was among those KPA cancelled recently.
