The tender involved was launched last June, and was for the production of driver's licences, and vehicle registration documents.
Only three companies put in bids, one of which, from a Portuguese company, was rejected because the company did not provide the bank guarantee requested.
A Mozambican company, Brithol Michcoma, said it could do the job for two million US dollars. Its South African rival, Face Technologies, demanded four million dollars for the same work.
There has been no public announcement of the contract award, but Brithol Michcoma says if learnt from sources in the World Bank (which financed the tender) that ANE signed the contract with Face Technologies on 8 February.
Asked by the weekly paper "Domingo" why it had accepted the more expensive bid, ANE spokesmen had two lines of response. One was the extremely feeble line that there is still no formal winner to the contract, and the other was that the price does not really matter.
"It's clearly stated in the tender documents that it's not just the price that is determinant", said ANE official Aderito Guilamba.
He claimed that an assessment had to be made of the full proposals from the bidders and not just their prices. "The documents are clear that price is just one of the criteria", he said. "The price is the last aspect to be verified, among all the bidders who meet the minimum requirements established by the tender documents".
But when the "Domingo" reporter read the contract document, he found that, although the ANE could verify other aspects of the bids, price was fundamental in awarding the contract.
Brithol Michcoma insists that, at a meeting on 15 February with two staff members of the World Bank office in Maputo, it was informed that the contract had been signed a week earlier - before ANE had officially announced the result, and without giving Brithol Michcoma the chance to query why the ANE was accepting a proposal that would cost it twice as much as Brithol's bid.
Naturally, there are suspicions that in the tender ANE had merely gone through the motions and a deal had already been stitched up in favour of the South African company.
The technical reason suggested for the choice concerns the equipment to be used. Face Technologies says it will use the package "FT-Oracle 10g", produced by the US-based Datacard group.
The managing director of Brithol Michcoma, Haitham Elsiddiq, retorts that it is absurd to use this package for relatively short runs (400,000 driving licences and an extra 25,000 a year for five years, and somewhat smaller quantities of vehicle documents).
The equipment cited by Face Technologies is generally used for much larger quantities of documents, said Elsiddiq - but, in any case, it was not so expensive (32,000 US dollars at most) to justify the extra two million dollars that Face Technologies was asking for.
Furthermore, Elsiddick pointed out, Brithol Michcoma is the official representative of Datacard in Mozambique.
Brithol Michcoma is protesting to the World Bank (both the local office and the Bank's headquarters) - but Bank staff in Maputo said the only thing the Bank could conceivably do would be to withdraw its funding for the project.
A World Bank mission that visited Mozambique last week met with the ANE and with Brithol Michcoma - only after this intervention did the ANE write to Brithol Michcoma giving the result of the tender. The ANE has yet to make any public announcement, as requested by the Bank mission.
SOURCE: AIM
