Wed, Oct 27, 1999 page3

• Legislators demand end to rigged public tenders

  • By Oliver Lin / STAFF REPORTER
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  With tens of billions of Taiwan dollars being spent on reconstruction efforts in the wake of the 921 earthquake, legislators are trying to find better mechanisms to guarantee fund distribution without corruption.

  The government estimates the cost of rebuilding infrastructure and public facilities such as schools to be more than NT$53 billion.

  DPP lawmakers Michael Tsai (1/22明憲) and Shiu Tai-san (邱??T) said at the legislature yesterday that corruption by government officials and bid-rigging by construction companies and gangsters needs to be stopped -- if the building of new public facilities is to be superior to that revealed by the quake.

  Vice president Lien Chan (3s戰) told a KMT meeting two weeks ago that measures had to be taken to deal with the structural weakness of public buildings.

  "When I visited disaster areas, ... I found serious safety problems in many public buildings, such as schools, police stations, fire departments and other government buildings -- which did not withstand the tests posed by the earthquake," Lien said.

  One of the reasons for the structural weakness in such buildings was that "the construction process was not well supervised," said Lien.

  But legislators were more direct, blaming the problems on corruption and the involvement of gangsters in the construction process.

  "At the very beginning, bid-rigging is already seeded in the form of designs tailored to the specification of contractors favored by the officials in charge," Shiu said. "No other bidders will be able to compete, as they are already disqualified by being unable to meet the requirements specified in designs."

  At the end of the construction process, when shady contractors want to get away with shoddy building practices, they hire gangsters to intimidate government inspectors, he said.

  These problems should not deter a government from constructing high-quality public buildings, said DPP legislator Chen Ding-nan (3祟w南), who gained notoriety as "Mr. Clean," during his terms as Ilan County commissioner.

  To deal with bid-rigging at the start of construction planning, government supervisors can always ask for help from experts and professionals, and keep the specifications from favoring certain bidders, Chen said.

  Gangster intervention should not be a problem if the government officials themselves are upright and clean, he said.

  "I cannot rule out that there is a possibility of gangster involvement in the public construction process, but as the saying goes: `robbers also have their principles (盜亦|31D),'" he said.

  "If officials are clean, and thus expose no weaknesses, gangsters will not find fault with them," Chen said, hinting that it is far harder to blackmail an honest official than a corrupt one.

  As for the problem of contractors competing for the same tender trying to intimidate one another, Chen said it is very important to keep the bidders' names strictly confidential by not allowing officials possibly colluding with contractors to see them.

  The Executive Yuan's Public Construction Commission (PCC) officials said there are now mechanisms in place to prevent certain bidders from being favored by "special" designs and planning.

  "All designs have to be made freely available in order to solicit public questioning before they are finalized," said Chou Chu-kun (周筑昆), director of the PCC's construction management department.

  "That transparency should help," he said. If not, jail terms can be the last resort, he said.

  "If bid-rigging is substantiated with evidence, offenders can be sentenced to up to seven years in prison by the Government Procurement Act," John Li (李建??), deputy chairman of the PCC, said.
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