The Madras High Court on Thursday rejected a petition to stay all further proceedings pursuant to Tangedco awarding the tender for constructing the 2X660 MW Ennore SEZ Supercritical Thermal Power Project to BHEL.
Nearly 15 days after the contract was awarded to BHEL, its competitor, a consortium, filed a writ petition before the Madras High Court, challenging Tangedco’s order of September 27awarding the contract to BHEL.
Justice T.S. Sivagnanam made it clear that the award of contract to BHEL would be subject to the result of the writ petition, and posted the matter for further hearing after three weeks.
The petitioner, CSEPDI (Central Southern China Electric Power Design Institute)-Trishe Consortium, represented by its Managing Director, Sanjay K. Pillai, said the awarding of the contract to BHEL was illegal and on the basis of a non-speaking order. It was against the Tamil Nadu Transparency in Tenders Act.
‘No assessment’
The power distribution company should have seen that it had not done any assessment of the comparative merits of the two bidders. Had it been done, it would have been seen that BHEL had not successfully commissioned even a single supercritical thermal power project of the capacity given in the tender document. BHEL had inordinately delayed projects for Tangedco.
The Tangedco did not call for any clarification from the consortium nor did it afford any personal hearing. After over four weeks of receipt of representation of August 25, the company by a communication dated September 27 informed the petitioner of rejecting its plea on both financial as well as objective analysis touching upon BHEL’s past performance and vendor rating.
Upon receiving the communication, the consortium addressed a letter to Tangedco on October 1 highlighting the “arbitrariness, anomalies and inconsistencies” in its reasoning and the “mala fide intent” writ large in the matter of evaluating the respective merits in the material placed by it for rejecting BHEL’s bid.
Security deposit Krishna Srinivasan, counsel for BHEL, submitted that the pursuant to letter of intent issued on September 27, the public sector undertaking had furnished security deposit in the form of a bank guarantee.
Mr. Justice Sivagnanam said the events subsequent to September 27 could not be ignored. Hence, at this stage, he was of the view that no stay or injunction could be granted as the site was handed over to BHEL on October 9.
