Lalith De Silva to pay for the damages

From Lankanewsweb

As we promised to expose more corruptions at Sri Lanka Telecom and Mobitel, information are pouring in to that effect and the story here is about how Mr. Lalith De Silva as Group Chief Executive Officer at SLT has mislead the chairman and the Board of directors to fulfil his money hunger through clear violation of tender procedures.

We wonder if things in SLT continue to be like this, the new chairman and the Board of directors with newly appointed Government members are faced with numerous questions to answer; what will be the fate of the interest of the shareholders? What will happen to the share price of SLT in the capital markets? Who will have confidence to invest in such a corrupt company? And also, what will happen to the company who currently provided livelihood for hundreds of thousands of people directly and indirectly?

This story is about the manipulation that has taken place in the SLT Tender to purchase Wi-Fi Hotspots. 30th April 2014 was the original cut-off date for the bidders to submit the final offer for the above tender. However, further to SLT’s request, Huawei and ZTE submitted revised offers on 16th June 2014, where Huawei reduced original bid price by USD 4.45M. Meanwhile ZTE’s price was increased by USD 8.80M for missing items claimed by them, despite the fact that there was a clear declaration in the tender stating that “Declaration-The BOQ provides the fully blown solution proposed in the Bid. No any additional Equipment/Items for future upgrades within the period of 5 years. If by any chance if any components/equipment are required it should be on a FOC basis. This declaration should be contained in your proposal”. The quoted prices and the scopes indicated by the two vendors in terms of number of base stations are depicted in the following table;

To everyone’s surprise, SLT commercial evaluation team notified the acceptance of ZTE’s increased offer submitted on 16th June 2014, despite the declaration, whilst declining to accept Huawei’s price reduction.

Despite the cost damages and pricing facts, the situation got worsened when in an internal report SLT commercial evaluation team claimed that only the prices up to 30th April 2014 were considered, in order to hide the truth and to mislead the Board of Directors.In this scenario, the final calculated prices in the internal report (factoring 1555 base stations) were as follows:

SLT internal sources says, the USD 63.83M is not an official submission by Huawei to SLT to the said tender but merely an internal calculation done by SLT officials who were involved in the project evaluation. It will be interesting to everyone to find out who gobbled the kickbacks from this project. For sure the project team would have the blessing of some unforeseen power of influencer/s to do it and for them to have immunity. But, with the corruptions of GCEO Mr. Lalith de Silva are surfacing in numbers, SLT officers now come out to wipe out their hands. According to them GCEO Mr. Lalith de Silva has forced the evaluation team to do these silly modifications to substantiate and justify an excuse for the price increase of USD 8.8M of ZTE from the previous submission of 30th April 2014 for misleading the members of the board of directors. Huawei’s official price in its last submission on the 16thof June still remains as USD 54.82M which is USD 2M lesser than ZTE.

It is learnt that, thus far, SLT has failed to provide any satisfactory official clarification to numerous queries by Huawei in both electronic and printed form. Instead of providing clarifications, SLT cancelled Huawei’s Letter of Intent-LoI (Only 30% was awarded to Huawei), and issued a LOI to ALU while Huawei’s LoI was still effective.

Furthermore, we believe that already the benefits have been shared with the people who helped ZTE at least partially by now withMr. Lalith De Silva playing the main role. Why the New Chairman KumarasingheSirisenais trying to protect this corrupt individual remains a question that is intriguing. As per the information received, already the two Purchase Orders have been given to the supplier amounting to 200 base stations. We assume the respective benefits have been also been fulfilled on success basis.

It is true that everything is now setup to replace this corrupt GCEO at the end of the month. But,SLT officers claim that Lalith De Silva should pay for the damages caused to this prestigious blue chip company through his mismanagement and malpractices by keeping the employees and customers as hostages, without letting him to escape freely.