Vendor sues KP govt over bombproof vehicles issue

PESHAWAR: The row over four costly bombproof luxury sports utility vehicles (SUVs) worth around Rs143 million between the Khyber Pakhtunkhwa government and a private vendor has turned serious as the dealer has taken the matter to court citing security concerns in keeping the said vehicles in the showroom.
Though the vendor in the petition at the Peshawar High Court (PHC) raised certain points against the government’s decision to reject the vehicles in violation of the terms of the contract, yet he also cited the security risks in keeping the vehicles in his showroom. The court will take up the petition for hearing on September 10. The four vehicles were being bought for use by the top government functionaries, including three politicians and one bureaucrat.
The issue came to the surface when all of a sudden the Pakistan Tehreek-e-Insaf-led provincial government on July 31 terminated the contract with the private vendor four months after having used the four B-7 level armoured Land Cruiser and Lexus SUVs worth Rs142.948 million. The government cited certain interior and exterior finishing defects, including bulkhead structure and rear seat adjustability of these costly vehicles.
According to the document available with The News, the Administration Department in a letter on July 31 asked the Toyota Frontiers Motors (Pvt), Peshawar, to keep the vehicles and return the principal amount with interest or else face legal action.
Stunned by the abrupt decision of the government to terminate the contract without waiting for the deadline to rectify the defects that had been highlighted, the Toyata Frontier Motors Private Limited Managing Director Niaz Badshah moved the court seeking remedy against what he called the careless attitude of the authorities concerned in the provincial government.
The document shows that the provincial government floated a tender for four bullet and bombproof vehicles on January 26, 2014 and four vendors showed up for bidding on February 13, 2014. The bid of Toyota Frontier Motors was accepted as it was the lowest of all.
According to the document, the No Objection Certificate (NoC) that was supposed to be issued soon after the acceptance of the bid was belatedly given on December 6, 2014 so that the vehicles could be shifted to Pakistan from Dubai.
Some two months before the dispatch of the vehicles to Pakistan, the technical member of the provincial government, Shafqat Malik, Assistant Inspector General, Bomb Disposal Unit (BDU), was taken to Dubai to personally inspect the armouring of the vehicles.
The document further indicates that finally the vehicles were handed over to the Administration Department on April 15 with original papers for registration and certificates for certain specifications such as brand of tyres, ballistic sheets, firewall structure, runflats, etc that were provided at the later stage on the demand of the authorities.
However, after driving the vehicles for around three months and thousands of miles, these were returned to the vendor on July 24, 2015 for retrofitting of the vehicles and making minor changes to the bulkhead structure and rectifying the rear seat adjustability problem. The vendor was given 45 days for rectification of these problems, but on July 31, the Administration Department terminated the contract leaving the vendor in utter shock.
“The government complaints were of minor nature and we were rectifying them as per specified time and standard, but the Administration Department abruptly and unilaterally terminated the contract. This is not fair,” Niaz Badshah said.
Manager Toyota Frontier Motors, Saida Khan, told The News that the vehicles, each worth Rs36.2 million, were imported, customs-cleared and even registered in the name of the provincial government after the NoC was issued by the Ministry of Interior and now these could not simply be abandoned to get rust at a workshop.
“Keeping such expensive and secured units in the workshop has exposed us to all sorts of security threats. This is a matter of concern and the authorities should keep this in view,” he stressed. When his comment was sought, spokesperson of the provincial government, Mushtaq Ghani, who is also information minister, said he had been told that the vehicles lacked the specifications that the government had sought. “We retuned these vehicles as proper procedure was not followed during the armouring and other modifications in the vehicles,” he said.