E-Clips:- Business Pictorial - French Firm Defends Its Kenya Passport Contract

Business Report, South Africa

A leading French security printing firm on Wednesday defended the multimillion-dollar price tag of its contract with the government of Kenya, which has launched a corruption inquiry over the deal.

Legislators here have cried foul over the 2.7 billion shilling (R232 million) contract awarded last year to the Paris-based Groupe Francois-Charles Oberthur Fiduciaire on the grounds that it replaced - allegedly without competitive bidding - an earlier tender with a more modest, 800 million shilling budget.

The deal has been put on hold pending investigations.

In full-page advertisements in the Kenyan press, the French firm said such "suspicion appears to us as defamatory since it is impossible to compare the projects, which are totally different in scope and, therefore, by their respective costs."

The firm explained that the original budget only covered a passport-issuing system, whereas the contract it had won "is for a comprehensive, high security, advanced technology set of immigration systems and new-generation passports and visas."

The firm added that it understood Kenya had undertaken a "project of that scope to prove its intent to improve national security and fight against terrorism."

The French firm, established in 1842, which prints identity papers and banknotes, and counts 50 national banks as customers, spoke out after top government officials were grilled by anti-corruption police over the affair.

The allegations of graft are highly awkward for a government that swept to power in December 2002 on a platform of ending the endemic corruption that had characterised Kenyan public life for decades.