On April 15, the Property Administration made a decision on the emergency procurement of kitchen and laundry room equipment at the Clinical Centre of Montenegro, worth €300 thousand. The emergency of the procurement, which provided for a complete procedure to be carried out within ten days, was justified at that time by the epidemiological situation in the country.
However, the documentation obtained by the MANS Investigative Centre shows that the contract was signed only a day after decision to initiate the procurement was made. The job of procuring equipment for the Clinical Centre was given to the Podgorica company Pro Horeca, owned by Mirko Čarapić.
The decision to launch an emergency procurement of the kitchen and laundry room equipment at the Clinical Centre of Montenegro, signed by the director of the Property Administration, Blažo Šaranović, apart from referring to the coronavirus disease situation, does not contain a detailed explanation why such a valuable procurement is carried out urgently. It is not stated what type of equipment for the kitchen and laundry room was requested by the Clinical Center, or how the Administration got the price of €300 thousand.
In the public procurement plan of the Clinical Centre for this year, there is no procurement of equipment for the kitchen and laundry room.
However, the complete work was done in just two working days. According to the Rulebook for emergency procurement, which was passed by the Property Administration, and the documentation obtained by MANS, the emergency procurement was conducted by the director Blažo Šaranović and the public procurement officer, Nela Milošević.
In 16 working hours (two working days), they:
- Passed the Decision on initiating emergency procurement
- Prepared a Request for submission of bids
- Sent a Request for at least three addresses
- Received bids
- Publicly opened bids
- Made the Record on review, assessment and evaluation of bids
- Prepared a Draft notice on the outcome of the emergency procurement
- Prepared an Official Notice
- Notified the winner of the emergency procurement
- Prepared an Emergency Procurement Contract
- Signed the Emergency Procurement Contract with the bidder.
Although the Law and the Rulebook on Emergency Procurement provide for the acquisition of at least three bids, there is no information in the decision on awarding the job to the company Pro Horeca that, apart from this one, some other bid was evaluated as well.
Incorrect data on Mirko Čarapić’s company, included in the decision on job assignment, also testify to how urgent the procurement was. Thus, instead of the TIN of his company, the number of another company that has nothing to do with this business was entered.
Even after two weeks, we received no answer from the Property Administration to the question of how many bids they received before the job was awarded to Čarapić.
Also, although everything was completed in just two days, the data from the Contract suggest that the procurement of the kitchen and laundry room equipment may not have been so urgent, or conditioned by the coronavirus epidemic.
Namely, the Contract between the Property Administration and the company Pro Horeca does not specify a precise deadline for the delivery of the purchased equipment, but states that Čarapić will “deliver the goods successively, if necessary, and at the request of the procuring entity “.
This is confirmed by the response TV Vijesti received from the Clinical Centre of Montenegro.
At the beginning of March, as many as three washing machines, two steam boilers and two dump trucks broke down, without the possibility of repair because spare parts are no longer produced for them due to the age of the equipment, and in addition to other equipment that was broken in the earlier period, the Clinical Centre had to ensure normal functioning of the kitchen and laundry room. We recognized that the workload of the Institution would be reduced to a minimum in a longer period, and that this might be a good time to renovate the equipment and space of the kitchen and laundry room, and most importantly, without our own kitchen and laundry room we should not enter a situation of an already increased epidemiological risk. In this regard, we turned to the Property Administration for support, because there were no funds in the regular Procurement Plan for the current year for this. Epidemiological situation in Montenegro stabilized unexpectedly quickly. However, as the summer months go by and when the routine work of KCCG is reduced, we believe that we will complete all the procedures quickly.
The contract worth €300,000 is a significant financial injection for Mirko Čarapić’s company, whose assets are encumbered with several mortgages previously taken from Atlas Bank. Čarapić, son of the former Supreme State Prosecutor and current member of the Prosecutorial Council, Ranka Čarapić, founded the company in late 2015, and the contract with the Property Administration represents more than half of his average annual income for the last four years.
Čarapić will receive funds for this job from the Budget of Montenegro, although Montenegro has received more than eight million Euros in donations since the beginning of the coronavirus epidemic.
Dejan Milovac, MANS Investigative Centre
Miodrag Rašović, MANS
