Siemens Telecommunications said on Friday it had appointed a task team to conduct an internal audit to establish whether any current or former Siemens employees may have provided unauthorised assistance to two of the bidders for the country’s Second Network Operator (SNO) licence.
Should there be any indication of such misconduct, appropriate disciplinary action and possibly criminal steps would be taken against those involved, it indicated. It added that if any unauthorised assistance by Siemens employees had taken place to influence the content of any of the bidders’ submissions, this was done outside “the scope of Siemens’ management directives and Siemens’ measures of corporate governance”.
The statement by the company comes in the wake of a recent claim by one of the two bidders aiming to control South Africa’s second national fixed-line telephone network, Goldleaf Trading, that parts of a rival’s submission bid had been plagiarised from its own submission.
Joseph Okpaku, chairman of Goldleaf Trading, charged last month that parts of the bid submitted by its competitor, the Optis Telecommunications consortium, were taken verbatim from material over which he held copyright.
Okpaku said the material had been drawn from a cellular licence bid in Mozambique in which he had been involved. The Optis bid, which was riddled with errors, at times referred to Mozambique rather than South Africa. According to news reports, Optis initially shifted the blame for the apparent plagiarism to independent consultants it said had been responsible for preparing the bid. However, it has since blamed equipment vendor Siemens.
In a written submission to Independent Communications Authority of South Africa (Icasa), Optis chairman Alan Friedland said Siemens had agreed to prepare the consortium’s bid free of charge, but suddenly demanded a payment of R2,7-million to complete the document “a few weeks” before the document was due to be submitted.
The demand was refused, he said, and “Optis submitted the relevant documents that had been prepared by Siemens as the documents then stood”.
Optis offered a statement by Stanley Phekani, employed by Siemens until December, to back the assertion. However, in a position statement issued on Friday, Siemens denied officially assisting or supplying any information to either of the two bidders for the 51% stake in the SNO to start competing with Telkom this year.
“In the context of Siemens being a vendor of telecommunications infrastructure, one of the bidders did receive an official communication from Siemens that, should it be successful in its bid, Siemens would assist them with technology after the adjudication process has taken place. Siemens does not have a partnership or agreement with either of the two bidders for the 51% stake in the SNO, nor did it officially assist or supply any information to either of them to enable them to submit a bid.
“Whilst Siemens was approached by one bidder to assist in the preparation of documentation for the adjudication process, it was and still is the policy of Siemens that any assistance in this regard would have been contrary to the scope of Siemens interest in the SNO project. Also, such conduct would not be within the spirit in which the company conducts itself,” the equipment provider stated. – I-Net-Bridge