SC: Smartmatic eligible for OMR contract

MANILA, Philippines - The Supreme Court has upheld the eligibility of the Smartmatic consortium for the lease of 23,000 optical mark readers to be used by the Commission on Elections (Comelec) in the general elections in May.

In a 41-page decision last Dec. 8, the high court dismissed the petition filed by the group led by former Comelec commissioner Augusto Lagman assailing the poll body’s resolution in June last year, which allowed Smartmatic to bid for the P2.2-billion contract that the firm eventually bagged.

The SC held that the poll body was correct in reversing its Bids and Awards Committee’s resolution that earlier disqualified Smartmatic and declared a failure of bidding.

Smartmatic was disqualified for failure to submit its articles of incorporation, but the high court agreed with Comelec’s ruling that such document was not included in the requirements.

“A perusal of the bidding documents would readily reveal that the procuring entity, the Comelec in this case, did not impose such a requirement can be gleaned in the Instruction to Bidders,” read the decision written by Associate Justice Presbitero Velasco Jr.

The ruling affirmed the Comelec resolution clearing the bid of the Smartmatic–Total Information Management Corp. joint venture for the lease of 23,000 vote-reading machines.

In a 41-page decision dated Dec. 8, the court denied the petition by Lagman and poll technology experts Leo Querubin and Corazon Akol to reverse the Comelec’s June 29 resolution.

The resolution had granted Smartmatic-TIM’s appeal to overturn the order.

The Smartmatic-TIM joint venture was the sole bidder to hurdle pre-qualification, but by the post-qualification stage, the BAC said it did not submit valid documents.

The SC said the Comelec was correct in reversing the BAC’s resolution, because the supposedly defective article of incorporation (AOI) it cited was not actually included in Comelec’s documents to be submitted.

The high court also cited its landmark ruling, which allowed Comelec to again purchase the precinct count optical scan (PCOS) machines leased for the 2010 elections in the succeeding 2013 polls, saying the deal effectively extended Smartmatic-TIM’s corporate purpose.

It further stressed that AOI was not among the requirements mandated by the Government Procurement Reform Act’s implementing rules and regulations.

The SC also junked petitioners’ claim that the joint venture led by Smartmatic-TIM did not meet the 60 percent Filipino ownership requirement.

Petitioners alleged that Smartmatic-TIM is 100 percent foreign-owned and had a 46.5-percent share in the joint venture, which meant the joint venture could not join the bidding for failure to meet the nationality requirement.

But the SC ruled that they did not offer any relevant evidence to substantiate their claim and instead gave weight to Smartmatic’s declaration that Filipino investors have control of 135,600,000 of its 226,000,000 shares.

The SC has yet to resolve other petitions questioning Comelec’s actual P6.2-billion contract awarded to Smartmatic consortium for the lease of OMRs for the elections.