Subah Info Solutions, one of the five companies that bid for the Interconnect Clearing House (ICH) license from the National Communications Authority (NCA), also had serious technical problems with its application, the Daily Searchlight has learned.
Even though SUBAH came second in the appraisal by the Application Evaluation Panel set up by the NCA, the Daily Searchlight has very credible information that SUBAH’s application was also fraught with at least two major drawbacks.
First, at the time the bid was opened, SUBAH was alleged to be Indian owned, instead of having at least 70% of its ownership being Ghanaian. This was attested to by documentation presented to the panel by representatives of SUBAH.
SUBAH was however given the chance to correct this anomaly, which is unfair to other bidders. “This one alone should have disqualified SUBAH from the very unset. It is a much more serious matter than ‘transposed scores,” said a source.
Secondly, this newspaper has learned that SUBAH was unable to prove that it had concluded contracts with its supposed technical partner, Erricson. According to insiders, both limitations should have disqualified SUBAH from the bidding. However, it was allowed to participate to the very end of the process coming up second behind AFRIWAVES.
“It is surprising that all those who have claimed that they have investigated this matter so thoroughly have not come up with these facts. Why? Are they suppressing these facts for any reason?” they wondered.
The media in the past week has been full of a debate fueled by IMANI Ghana Limited, the think tank, which has cast doubt on the circumstances surrounding the process by which the NCA came to award the license for the interconnect clearing house to AFRIWAVE.
IMANI’s case has been that the process lacked transparency mainly because the score were messed up along the way. The NCA acknowledges that this was a mistake occasioned from ‘graduating’ information from one computer program to other.
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