A company registered barely three months earlier has reportedly secured contracts worth over N215 million from the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC), sparking fresh concerns about possible violations of procurement laws.
Findings from the federal public payments portal, GovSpend, show that Swanty 16 Kitchen Enterprise, incorporated with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC) on March 15, 2023, began receiving multimillion-naira contracts from the FRSC by June of the same year.
On July 12, 2023, the firm was awarded a N36.74 million contract for the “provision of catering services for the feeding of trainees at the FRSC training camp in Kontagora, Niger State, for the month of June 2023.”
This suggests that the company received payment for services just three months after its incorporation.Barely a month later, on August 8, 2023, the FRSC paid the company N54.36 million for feeding trainees at military facilities in Kontagora.
Another N52.8 million followed for similar services in August, while payments of N59.2 million and N11.9 million were made on October 5 and October 12, 2023, respectively.
Altogether, the new company received five payments totalling N215 million within a seven-month window. However, questions have emerged over how Swanty 16 Kitchen met procurement requirements as outlined in the Bureau of Public Procurement (BPP) Act, 2007, which demands that bidders present valid tax clearance certificates, pension compliance certificates, and evidence of remittances to the Nigeria Social Insurance Trust Fund (NSITF).
Legal practitioner Awosusi Kehinde described the development as questionable, noting that a newly registered company would ordinarily be unable to present a tax clearance certificate covering a financial year.
“To win a federal contract, you need your tax clearance certificate, which you cannot get as a three-month-old company. The process also requires pension and NSITF certificates. The issue is how a company that young could have secured the necessary documentation to bid,” he said, warning that the case may amount to a breach of procurement regulations.
Meanwhile, checks by SaharaReporters revealed that the company has no visible digital footprint, while its ownership details remain absent from the CAC’s beneficial ownership registry.
