Top officials drawn from the Nairobi County ICT department at City Hall and senior managers of Copy Cat Group, a regional IT solution and office automation outfit are accused of having facilitated illegal payment amounting to Sh89million to the latter for work not done, The Informer has learnt.
Copy Cat Group is said to have received the irregular payment for alleged supply and installation of smartnet licenses to operationalise the multi-billion World Bank funded data centre but ended up supplying nothing despite gobbling up colossal amounts of money from the public coffers.
Initially, the Sh890million tender was awarded to Techno Brain Kenya Limited but a petition was filed to Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA) after the evaluation committee forged the tender document to and raised mobilisation fee payable to the vendor from the requisite 20 per cent to 30 per cent.
Effectively, Copy Cat Group was paid for an already awarded tender and paid for not work done.
Fellow tenderers who participated in the bid filed the petition after discovering substantive tender document had been altered.
The data centre has been lying idle since it was launched by President Uhuru Kenyatta in 2017 for lack of smart network license and visualisation software to make it operational.
Investigations by The Informer established that Copy Cat Group received the payout for work not done.
Instead, currently, the county through the Nairobi Metropolitan Services (NMS) is relying on the Nairobi Revenue Services (NRS) system to run county functions including revenue collection owned and operated by National Bank of Kenya (NBK) alongside the Kenya Revenue Authority (KRA).
The lucrative contract was to enable the county government have its own Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) to support all operations including revenue collection.
Further, the evaluation committee is said to have demanded kickbacks to a tune of Sh40million to award Techno Brain the contract and benchmarking trips fully paid up by Techno Brain to Ethiopia, Botswana and Namibia.
One of the beneficiaries is said to have bought a house in Kitengela, a new vehicle and a hotel using the loot.
When contacted severally through phone calls, short text messages and mail for comment, County Executive Committee Member (CECM) for ICT and E-government Newton Munene acknowledged having received the queries but declined to respond.
“I saw your questions. I will respond at some point. You can go ahead and publish your story.” Munene said through a telephone conversation with The Informer.
However, ICT Chief Officer Peter Mukenya and Copy Cat Group Managing Director Vishal Patel did not respond by the time of going to publication.
According to documents seen by us, following the award, Techno Brain raised invoice number 960001990 dated April 1, 2020 amounting to Sh170million as mobilisation fee.
However, officials and tender evaluation committee members from ICT department are said to have colluded to raise the allowable mobilisation kitty from 20 per cent to 30 per cent fraudulently.
“Copy Cat was engaged later and paid to supply smartnet licenses which they have not supplied to date despite receiving payment. Techno Brain Kenya Limited is still awaiting to be paid mobilisation fee to deploy the system.” Our source privy with the goings on intimated.