How to make money from a tender at the Department of Ukraine for the Execution of Sentences

A new way of combining the useful with the pleasant can be seen from the results of the procurement of anti-tuberculosis drugs by the Department of Ukraine for the Execution of Sentences in 2011. The tender participants managed both to do something useful – helping sick convicts – and not to forget about the pleasant – making some extra money by selling the drug at almost double the real price.
From July to November of this year, penal institutions will receive anti-tuberculosis drugs for the treatment of drug-resistant tuberculosis. Based on the procurement results, these life-essential medicines will be provided to convicts by LLC “Pharmaceutical Preparations of the Regions”. This firm turned out to be the winner of the tender and bypassed its only competitor, PrJSC “Ganza”, by providing a lower price for second-line anti-tuberculosis drugs. After the opening of the competitive bidding proposals on 23 June, the tender commission decided to transfer 12,439,600.00 hryvnias to LLC “Pharmaceutical Preparations of the Regions”.
For this money, Ukrainian penitentiary institutions are to receive eight varieties of drugs. However, despite the fact that this price turned out to be the lowest among the tender proposals, a simple comparison of the cost of these drugs from the winner versus regular pharmacies raises quite a few questions. In particular, the price of ofloxacin. According to the notice of the results of the procurement procedure, LLC “Pharmaceutical Preparations of the Regions” offered one tablet of this medicine for 1 hryvnia and 50 kopecks.
With the aim of determining the real cost, a monitoring of the prices of this drug in ordinary pharmacies in the city of Kirovohrad was conducted. As it turned out, “on the outside”, a tablet of ofloxacin can be bought for 81 kopecks or, at most, for 1 hryvnia and 10 kopecks.
In the opinion of the head of the penitentiary direction of the All-Ukrainian Network of PLWH, Volodymyr Bocharov-Tuz, such a situation may indicate several trends. “Either the Department purchased some sort of super-effective drug, which is, of course, hard to believe, or it is simply such a scheme where the participant, in a lot consisting of 8 items of goods, manages to insert one or two items at inflated prices.” Moreover, for this tender participant, selling medicines at an inflated price is not a new business, Volodymyr notes.
How things really were in the situation with the procurement of anti-tuberculosis drugs this time is not yet clear. However, one thing remains obvious: the tender participants managed both to do something useful – helping sick convicts – and not to forget about the pleasant – making some extra money by selling the drug at almost double the real price.
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Press Service
KEO ACBO “All-Ukrainian Network of PLWH”
09 72 82 65 21