Pre-bid meet with 3 companies on Sirajganj power plant

The meeting was participated by representatives of US company AES Transpower, Malaysian company YTL Power International Berhard and Indian company GMR Energy Ltd and its local partner Cosmos Engineering.

Three other companies British Globelaq, Bangladeshi Summit group and US-Irish Cadogan-Manning purchased pre-bid documents, but did not join the meeting.

The Sirajganj project is viewed as a symbol of failure of the immediate past 4-party alliance government in the power sector, as it had cancelled the project's first bid back in 2004 at the final stage. If that bid was not cancelled, the project would have started generating power by now. The Power Cell has been failing to float a bid for the last two years.

In July, the Power Cell finalised the pre-qualification document, relaxing criterion to allow participation of less qualified power companies. As a result, a novice company like Cadogan-Manning, that has zero experience in power sector, became pre-qualified to participate.

One of the pre-qualification criteria demanded that the bidder must have an experience of designing, constructing and developing at least 300 MW combined cycle power plants in maximum two sites. The inexperienced bidder may qualify, if it has a partner with such an experience but that partner should have minimum 10 percent equity in the project.

As Cadogan-Manning has never built a power plant, they showed names of different experienced power companies which are holding 10 percent or more equity with their bids for the Sirajganj power project.