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Karl Schembri
Investments Minister Austin Gatt has ordered the national broadcasting station to scrap its rebranding exercise halfway through the process, urging PBS to issue a new call for tenders, MaltaToday can reveal.
The minister’s surprise decision came in the wake of a MaltaToday story last month about the open-ended call for tenders that gave a freehand to bidders to offer a wide range of services quoting diverse prices. Most notably was the offer made by Where’s Everybody? which included audience surveys despite their direct involvement at the station as producers of Xarabank and Bondiplus.
PBS Chairman Andrew Agius Muscat had declined to answer questions about the call for tenders, but last night, the minister’s spokesman told MaltaToday that the whole process had been scrapped.
“The Ministry does not go into the merits of the proposals but ensures that established procedures and practices are adhered to,” Jesmond Saliba said. “In this case it transpired that no prior cost-benefit assessment had been made and no clear scope of supply had been constructed and included in the tender. In this setting, this office directed PBS to abort the process and re-start it in the correct form.”
In simpler words, the minister ordered the station to stop the process after several offers were made as the request for proposals was extremely generic, leaving it totally up to the bidders to come up with their ideas for the PBS rebranding.
This gave a carte blanche to Where’s Everybody?, among others, to offer holding a daily viewership survey and analysis for PBS, and another “perceptions survey” – a contentious area of activity for the production company which would have raised serious credibility questions.
“Ultimately, if our proposal gets accepted, the survey itself will be up for approval by PBS, so all the questions would have been evaluated by the station,” Where’s Everybody? director Lou Bondì had said.
Now it is the station’s own rebranding plans that are under evaluation. Suggesting that the original request was not approved by the ministry, Saliba said: “A standing corporate policy of the ministry is that of ensuring that investments are made in the most effective fashion and that all procurement processes are conducted in a transparent and open way. In implementing this policy, the Ministry reviews a number of requests for proposals and tendering procedures conducted by the companies in its portfolios, particularly those which are of a significant value in the context of the particular company.”
Initial information from sources close to PBS suggested that the tender had been adjudicated but was contested by one of the bidders. The minister’s spokesman however stuck to his written statement sent by e-mail, insisting that with the whole process scrapped, the question became irrelevant.
The call for offers closed on 22 July but it was only yesterday that government revealed its intentions to restart the process.
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