The Court Administration’s (TA) information system E-lieta, for which the related procurements began back in 2017, is an excellent demonstration of how this network of people operates, some of whom were detained this week. The documents show that officials and companies themselves both draw up the specifications, sit on the procurement committee, and select the winners.
The E-lieta example is just one of many, but essentially the same people also worked on the Skolas.lv project, where 3.5 million euros were squandered, as well as on E-veselība (E-health).
Thus, E-lieta consisted of several procurements, in total for about ten million euros, and they contained peculiarities that suggest dishonesty and possible conflicts of interest and crimes by the persons involved, at a time when the Court Administration (TA), which was the contracting authority for E-lieta, was headed by Edvīns Balševics.
For example, in the 2017 procurement “Development of architecture and technical specifications for the E-lieta solution and quality control services,” where the chair of the procurement committee was Andreta Skrastiņa and her deputy was Jorens Liopa, the committee chose as its expert, from the entire broad IT sector, Ainars Biders, who in 2001 had been one of the founders and co-owners of the company AA Projekts and sold the company in 2015. This procurement was won by SIA Corporate Consulting, owned by Aigars Ceruss, which engaged as a subcontractor SIA AA Projekts, a company that until recently had belonged to Biders.
Incidentally, Ainars Biders now works in the Ministry of Transport’s Information Technology Project Management Department as a procurement specialist.
Later, in another procurement, the situation was even more interesting – the same procurement committee engaged not only Ainars Biders as an expert, but also Jānis Sprukts, who in the documents is listed as a systems architect at SIA Corporate Consulting, and the procurement documents themselves were also prepared by Biders. Only one bidder took part in the procurement, and that bidder won. It was the company E-Synergy, whose owner at the time was Āris Āriņš, according to Lursoft data. However, as public information shows, alongside his own company, Āris Āriņš still worked as an employee of Aigars Ceruss’s company SIA Corporate Solutions, and he publicly represented this company at the BiSmart industry conference. The link between these companies is also evidenced by the fact that E-Synergy is now owned by Ceruss himself, although over all these years the management board member of the company has not changed.
It should be added that E-Synergy was one of the companies that also developed the Skolas.lv project, which collapsed, with 3.5 million euros squandered, yet at that time the prosecutor’s office failed to find those responsible.
Andreta Skrastiņa had already become Edvīns Balševics’s wife when Balševics himself became State Secretary of the Ministry of Environmental Protection, but Andreta Balševica continued to chair the procurement committee together with Jorens Liopa. The interlinked SIA Corporate Consulting and SIA E-Synergy continued to secure wins in E-lieta-related procurements even when other bidders with lower prices had taken part. For example, in the tender for the performance and security audit of the E-lieta program information systems (TIS, PLUS, PROIS, IIS) and the E-lieta platform, two bidders applied – SIA “PricewaterhouseCoopers” and SIA Corporate Consulting, which offered a price three times higher than PwC. Nevertheless, PwC was rejected, so “Corporate Consulting” effectively audited what its own companies had developed.
More here:
Year, procurement by SIA Axis Baltica
Originally published at https://inc-baltics.com/projekta-e-lieta-iepirkumu-dokumenti-lieliski-demonstre-ka-darbojas-aiztureto-personu-tiklojums-it-iepirkumos/
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