Citizens of Kyrgyzstan can enter only 17 countries without obtaining a visa — one of the lowest such rankings in the world. The introduction of new, biometric passports was supposed to make things easier.

Having bought the necessary equipment and created a biometric database, the government’s next step in reaching this goal was to procure the latest generation of passport booklets. A tender to obtain the booklets was held, and the winner announced in February.

But now the winning bid of 940 million soms (US$13.4 million) is at the center of a major corruption probe. Early this month, Kyrgyzstan’s state security agency, known as the GKNB, accused both current and former government officials of accepting bribes from the winner in the form of payment for international travel. The focus of the investigation is the State Registry Service, the agency that issues passports to citizens and put out the tender.

Three officials from the agency have been detained. One of them, according to Kyrgyz media, is also the head of the tender commission that decided on the bid, though this has not been officially confirmed.

Reporters from Kyrgyzstani web outlet Kloop and OCCRP have scrutinized the tender procedure, looked into the State Registry Service, and investigated Garsu Pasaulis, the Lithuanian company that won.

Whether or not the bribes alleged by the GKNB really did take place, an analysis of dozens of tender documents shows that the company’s bid — which fell short of qualifications — appears to have been treated extremely leniently by the commission in charge of evaluating it, which consisted largely of State Registry Service officials.

Not only did the commission overlook Garsu Pasaulis’s failure to meet certain requirements — while disqualifying its main competitor on similar grounds — it also failed to evaluate the company’s bid on an important metric on which it would have fallen even further short.

The documents further show that Garsu Pasaulis’s offer would result in higher passport prices for citizens.

Reporters also looked into the ownership of Garsu Pasaulis, finding a Belgian company and Belgian citizen behind it. Both are reportedly under investigation in Belgium and the Comoros Islands for corruption involving passport contracts in the Congo and the illegal sale of identification documents.

🔗A Troubled Tender Commission The tender commission that considered the passport booklet bids was not without its own problems. It consisted of 11 members, seven of which were from the State Registry Service. Four of these were found to have violated procedures in their day jobs, with some receiving official reprimands, in 2017. One member had reportedly faked her address in order to obtain a higher pension intended for residents of certain areas. Another was reprimanded for failures in the implementation of anti-corruption measures in her department. The agency did not reply to a request to provide details about the violations.

In an interview with reporters, Garsu Pasaulis’s director, Ana Janauskiene, denied paying any bribes to Kyrgyzstani officials, though she did say the company paid for some of their travel, speculating that it could have been business-related.

“It was somewhere around 2015 or 2016, and … absolutely unrelated to this tender,” she said.

A Changing Story

In initial conversations with reporters, State Registry Service press secretary Elzat Kydyrmysheva said only that her agency had “no official connections with Garsu Pasaulis in the past” and that its next steps would be determined by “the recommendations of the law-enforcement authorities.”

Things seemed to change in the week of April 15, after the detentions caused a growing scandal in Kyrgyz media.

In an April 17 press release, the State Registry Service now claimed that Garsu Pasaulis’ tender application had expired on April 2 with no contract being signed, and that as a result, the tender had not been concluded, and no “economic damage” had occurred. (It also said that an “independent audit” and a examination by a review commission found that no violations of tender procedures had taken place.)

An independent review of tender documents by reporters established that, in fact, the tender should have expired at the end of February. According to Kydyrmysheva, it was prolonged until the beginning of April after the German and French bidders submitted complaints about the process. It’s not clear why the question of expiration had not been raised until this week.

Sample passport pages from the State Registry Service show what the new passports will look like. Photo by State Registry Service

Favoring One Bidder

In all, five foreign companies applied for the passport booklets tender, which was announced in October 2018.

Three were rejected by the tender commission for failing to meet bid requirements. Of the remaining two — Garsu Pasaulis and a French competitor, IDEMIAFrance — the Lithuanian company won because it had submitted a lower bid.

But an analysis by reporters shows that the same criteria were applied differently to different bidders. In particular, Garsu Pasaulis appears to have sailed through requirements that the others were disqualified for not meeting.

One key criterion, meant to evaluate a company’s experience with large passport orders, was for bidders to have completed at least two projects and delivered at least 2 million booklets over the previous five years. To substantiate their claims, they were asked to provide copies of contracts, proofs of delivery containing exact figures, and reference letters.

IDEMIAFrance only provided documentation on the delivery of finished passport booklets for one of its contracts. The amount did not reach the 2 million requirement, which should have disqualified the company’s bid.

Furthermore, IDEMIAFrance submitted incomplete documentation by providing only excerpts of contracts it had fulfilled. The documents excluded some required details, such as the number of passport booklets to be delivered and the value of the contracts.

A German company, Mühlbauer ID Services GmbH, did claim it had delivered over 2 million booklets, submitting confirmation letters from Bosnia and Tajikistan. However, it provided no contracts, as was required.

Unlike IDEMIAFrance, the German company — a dangerous competitor since it had submitted by far the lowest bid — was disqualified for its omissions.

“They were simply looking for a pretext to motivate their decision [to reject the application],” Mühlbauer’s sales manager, Sandor Kovtun, told OCCRP. In the company’s view, he said, it had submitted sufficient other documentation to stand in place of the contracts.

The bid criteria were not met by the winning company either. Though Garsu Pasaulis provided all the required documentation, its total number of delivered passport booklets over the five-year period was under two million. To rise above the minimum requirement, the company included documents showing deliveries that took place over an additional 8-month period, an irregularity that appears to have gone unremarked by the tender commission.

🔗An Easier Bid In its bid, Garsu Pasaulis did not demonstrate another important capability. Kyrgyzstan’s new passports were supposed to use a robust polycarbonate material, which is more durable than regular paper. But though the technical specifications in the tender documentation mentioned this requirement, the State Registry Service never specified that successful bidders should have experience producing polycarbonate passport booklets with polycarbonate. If they had instituted this requirement, Garsu Pasaulis would not have been able to meet it. Of the two projects it submitted documentation for, only one used polycarbonate.

After Garsu Pasaulis won, both Mühlbauer and IDEMIAFrance complained to a separate review commission about the tender process.

Neither appeal was successful. Kovtun, the German company’s sales manager, told Kloop and OCCRP that it has sued the State Registry Service for illegitimately excluding it from the tender.

In their own complaint, IDEMIAFrance had attempted to draw the review commission’s attention to the legal problems Garsu Pasaulis was experiencing in Belgium. Though it submitted links to news articles about the Belgian investigation, the commission rejected their complaint.

Nuruipa Mukanova, a member of the review commission, told reporters that the commission is only able to review the original tender, and cannot take into account any additional information provided by applicants.