The Sindh High Court (SHC) has dismissed a complaint involving a track and trace programme grant worth millions of dollars.
SICPA SA’s bidder has contested the FBR’s grievance committee’s decision to award M/s AJCL an Rs120 million track and trace programme for tobacco, sugar, cement, and fertiliser monitoring.
Through its lawyers, the Swiss-based company claimed that the bidding process was corrupted and lacked transparency because the main goal was to grant the licence to a predetermined party at the expense of others.
M/s AJCL, on the other hand, has raised several objections to the suit’s maintainability and geographical jurisdiction of this court by applying, according to the order.
AJCL argued that because the tender was issued from Islamabad and all bids were received and examined by the licencing committee in the federal capital, its orders could not be challenged in the Supreme Court.
In her judgement, Justice Kausar Sultan of the Sindh High Court admitted that the Sindh High Court lacked geographical authority to issue a track and trace award. Still, she accepted the AJCL and FBR’s arguments.
The project was awarded to the AJCL consortium after it received 182.93 points. In comparison, NIFT and SICPA received 163.96 and 162.58 points, respectively, from FBR. It’s also worth noting that the IMF instructed Pakistan to build a track-and-trace system by June 2021, but the government failed to meet this deadline due to court judgments.
The FBR believes that by implementing this scheme during the current fiscal year, it will collect Rs100 billion in income.
