Problems with a company involved in a bottled water procurement scandal were not flagged by the Hong Kong government’s logistics department to a central board that approved the tender, a senior official has revealed, stressing that a probe into the case will also review the roles of those who gave the green light.
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Secretary for Financial Services and the Treasury Christopher Hui Ching-yu also said on Sunday that the Government Logistics Department (GLD) was tasked with promoting fair competition and introducing new players to the market, which might have led to its laxity with the company’s filings.
An Audit Commission review of the scandal published last week revealed that the department had repeatedly ignored suspected falsified documents submitted by Xin Ding Xin Trade, which eventually won the bid to supply bottled water to certain government offices but only asked the tenderer to resubmit documents that met the standards.
Hui said that the Financial Services and the Treasury Bureau’s central tender board gave the final approval on awarding the contract based on a report submitted by the department, but the report did not mention the irregularities in Xin Ding Xin’s filings.
“It is among our goals of the disciplinary investigation to sort out the roles and responsibilities of the GLD and the central tendering board,” said Hui, whose bureau oversees the department.
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“Since this process involved personnel from different parties, we need to make clear what they have done respectively through the investigation to be finished by the end of the year.”