A contract on a plate for one of the lasses
Here's a tale that deserves a lot more telling than it got. Since we think it is wrong to just let the story fade, we've decided to tell it ourselves. It involves someone called Heidi Kwan Cheng Lai-man. Most of you will not have heard of her but she's a protege of former chief secretary Rafael Hui Si-yan and was his close aide in at least two different government posts that he held.
When Mr Hui left the government last summer so did she to set up her own PR firm. Barely half a year later, she landed a HK$1.2 million government contract to publicise Secretary for Food and Health York Chow Yat-ngok's health reform plan. The contract was not open to general tender. It was simply handed to her.
Now, we all know the government likes to look after its own with generous helpings of the public's money, but you would expect officials to sound at least halfway convincing in trying to pull the wool over our eyes.
Here's a sampling of the government's reasons for putting the contract on a plate for Ms Kwan: 'We did not open the tender because of the need to maintain the confidentiality of the content.' 'We did a single tender because of urgency - it has to be completed in a short span of time.' For starters, what makes Ms Kwan more trustworthy than any other PR firm owner to maintain confidentiality? Her previous role as a civil servant? If that's the case, why not just hand all contracts to former bureaucrats? What makes her better able to handle an urgent contract than any other PR firm? Just because she once worked for Mr Hui?
Dr Chow now insists the process was fair and did not involve cronyism. How is awarding a public contract without tender to a former government colleague fair? Isn't that exactly the kind of behaviour that got the government into such a mess when it handed the Cyberport project to Richard Li Tzar-kai?
There's such a stench around this whole affair that the government auditor or ombudsman may want to look into it.
