Kirkpatrick’s Catering has been given a last chance to apply to offer catering services to parliament with the reopening of the tender process.
Margery Kirkpatrick yesterday told this newspaper that the process was reopened to accommodate them. She had written a letter to Speaker of the National Assembly Ralph Ramkarran indicating that her company would not have been bidding for the provision of the services since she missed the advertisements in the press inviting caterers to bid. The new bidding process is however closed and bids are being evaluated at this point.
On September 13, this newspaper reported that after 54 years of catering to the needs of the country’s parliamentarians, Kirkpatrick’s Catering, a family business, was left behind after not noticing the call for tenders until it was too late.
A source in the National Board of Procurement and Tender Administration said that the number of times that an invitation to tender appears in the press has to do with the nature of the project. The source said that for services such as catering, there is no fixed number of appearances for an invitation. The advertisement had appeared on at least four occasions.
