The Delhi High Court today passed an order effectively upholding the bid of the Gammon India-owned Italian power equipment manufacturer, Ansaldo Caldaie, in the NTPC-floated tender for the supply of super critical boilers.
Ansaldo had petitioned the court after NTPC rejected its bid on technical grounds. Winning a supply order through the tendering process would result in a mega business, running into several thousand crore of rupees.
Holding that NTPC's rejection of Ansaldo's bid “deserves to be quashed”, the court has noted, “consequently, NTPC will allow the writ petitioner (Ansaldo)…not only to proceed to the next stage (price bid) but also permit it to participate in the technical discussions.”
Interestingly, the name of a competitor in the tender, a joint venture of the Chennai-based BGR Energy and Hitachi, has figured prominently in the arguments.
The judges, Mr Rajiv Shakdher and Mr Sanjay Kishan Kaul, while noting “we are in the age of commercial espionage, it cannot be ruled out that information flowed to the competitor from an insider,” averred that “suspicion cannot be made the basis for arriving at a conclusion.”
The judgment records the arguments of Ansaldo's advocate, Mr Harish Salve, who had said, on the basis of the timing of BGR's and Hitachi's letters to NTPC, that the competitor and BGR Energy's Managing Director, Mr T. Sankarlingam, a former Chairman and Managing Director of NTPC, had triggered a chain of queries by NTPC upon Ansaldo's bid, culminating in the rejection of the bid.