How company with no proper offices won R81 million contract to supply Eastern Cape buses

The Eastern Cape awarded a tender to supply buses to a firm that didn't qualify for it, and was only registered months before the contract was awarded, according to a report.

The Daily Dispatch reports that Patuxolo Nodada's Siga Capital Asset Finance and Lease Solutions was disqualified from the Eastern Cape's Mayibuye Transport Corporation's bus contract because its tender didn't meet the evaluation committee's standard for a bus chassis.

Investigation by the Daily Dispatch found that Siga had:

• No proper offices;
• No landline office number and Nodada is contacted via his cellphone;
• The contact numbers provided to MTC in an invoice are invalid/private home lines; and
• An address registered to the company is that of a house in an affluent Kyalami Estate in Johannesburg.

MTC’s Bid Evaluation Committee recommended Ronnies Motors for the tender.

The board awarded Nodada's company the R81-million tender to supply 40 buses.

Nodada delivered one bus before the service's launch in December.

He delivered another 20 by 24 December, but half of them didn't have the right branding and others didn't have the right gearboxes.

He still owes MTC 19 more buses.

Read the full story at DispatchLive.