Alleged Lottery contract scam: Senate initiates out-of-court settlement

The Senate Committee on Sports has advised Infrastructure Regulatory Commission, Bureau for Public Procurement and the National Lottery Regulatory Commission, to settle their disagreement with System Numeric out of court.

The Senate Committee position was declared on Thursday after a troubleshooting meeting between the Senate Committee led by Senator Obinna Ogba and the warring parties.

Checks revealed that the Senate Committee admonition was in line with the advice of the Attorney-General of the Federation and Minister of Justice, Abubakar Malami (SAN) that the matter should be settled out of court to save Nigeria a subsisting loss of over N3 trillion annual revenue.

While giving the feuding parties two weeks deadlines to resolve their impasse out of court,  the federal lawmakers upbraided federal government agencies for their lack of tardiness in handing the bid that resulted in legal action.

Investigation revealed that the  Lottery Commission and the Bureau for Public Procurement allegedly shunned due process in the bidding process for the LPAAS contract.

System Numeric is accusing the Lottery Commission and Bureau for Public Procurement of violating due process in the bidding process for the contract as contained in the Act establishing the Lottery Commission.

In deference to the requirement stated during the bidding process in 2012, System Numeric submitted a technical proposal in which the financial proposal was a section.

The other company however submitted its technical and financial bids as separate documents in violation of Section 13, Page 17 of the Lottery Commission’s request for proposal, RFP.

According to the documents available, the rival bidder failed to submit the performance bond as required, whereas System Numeric provided a performance bond of N500,000,000.00 that was sourced from a bank.

Speaking with journalists shortly after the session with the Senate Committee,

Chief Executive Officer of System Numeric, Chief Athan Nneji Achonu,  offered an insight into the genesis of the breach of procedures that led to the ongoing face-off

 “It is a very sad day for me that I should come to this hallowed place to cry about a cabal that has been trying to hijack this process since 2012 and deny Nigeria of income of over N3 trillion.

“I won a contract to deploy this platform to monitor every lottery activity in this country. The first attempt they made was to bring in a fake company. This was taken to the House of Representatives and their verdict was that System Numeric was the only company that was qualified.

“They now changed tactics, started moving around to Italy, to Spain; they will bring one group or the other. Management changed but the same cabal would not budge. Because of their selfish interest, they have denied this country of tremendous revenue, that was why I had to cry to the Senate to give us justice.

“The infrastructure regulatory body was the only one appointed by Government to do the due diligence and they said the same.

I went to court because they want to award it. Then the Federal Government intervened and called for an out of court settlement that they have been losing.

“While we were in court, they went to negotiate with an Italian group to show the level of disrespect these people have for the judiciary. The Attorney-General of the Federation wrote a letter to them to settle out of court as the matter can go on indefinitely.

“It is obvious that a party that won this should be invited and awarded the contract,  but up till today, they have not invited my company. Even with a court injunction, they went behind to discuss with an Italian company

“We have the capability to deploy an effective monitoring system once a settlement is reached and this will earn good revenue for the government.”

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