CoA Hears Metsimotlhabe Roads Case
Mpho Mokwape | Monday January 23, 2017 16:35
PPADB and businessman, Nicholas Zakhem’s ZAC Construction have been in and out of court for the past three years over a P330 million tender dispute.
The tender was awarded to ZAC through a High Court ruling on October 2014 before a series of court cases surfaced with PPADB challenging the decision until the matter reached Court of Appeal (CoA).
Today the CoA bench will once again hear the matter with ZAC challenging the decision by PPADB to refuse to award the tender to them despite the CoA 2015 order.
Justices Lord Arthur Hamilton, Monametsi Gaongalelwe and Lord Cameron Abernathy had on February 5, 2015 ruled that the matter be remitted to the board for consideration.
ZAC’s contention is that the PPADB’s rejection on the basis that there was absence of the critical requirement was unreasonable since engineers from the Ministry of Lands together with consulting engineers had collectively considered them to be compliant in all respects.
In one of the company’s arguments in court, their lawyer, John Peter said the fact that it was decided by the board, the absence of a critical path was minor.
“Tenders that lacked the critical path were regarded as technically compliant and that the report that was compiled did not indicate any irregularities on the tender. The evidence showed that all engineers confirmed that ZAC had complied with all requirement,” he maintained.
PPADB on the other hand still refused to award the tender despite the CoA’s contention that ZAC did not include a critical path.
They maintained that since the critical path was longest sequence of activities in a project plan, it must have been completed on time for the project to complete on the due date.
“We analysed whether the ZAC Construction bid showed the critical path, and submit that it could reasonably be concluded that it did not do so,” argued PPADB advocate, Geoff Budlender.
Meanwhile, the tender at the heart of the dispute is for Metsimotlhabe Block IV internal roads, and it includes 52 kilometres of road and storm water reticulation, sewer reticulation as well as telecommunications civil works.