New Delhi: The Rajasthan government recently granted a contract to the company that owns the ANI news agency – ANI Media Private Limited – to ‘provide services for live streaming of the state government’s programmes’.
However, public records show that ANI Media won the contract through a tendering process after beating two other bidding companies, both of which have directors in common with it, and also postal addresses that are closely linked to each other.
A minimum of three bidders are required for a government tender to be valid. In this tendering process, there were only three bidders, and each is closely linked to the other – raising questions of propriety, conflict of interest and other irregularities in granting contracts for official work, going by the Rajasthan government’s own rules.
Official records show that three directors of ANI Media are also directors of the other two competing firms. These two firms also share a managing director. Together, these facts ought to have raised official concerns about possible bid rigging the undermining of fair competition.
As per the Rajasthan government’s e-procurement website, these three firms — ANI Media Private Limited (bid number 2811045), Asian Films TV Private Limited (bid number 2812040) and Yellowgate Ventures (bid number 2812070) — all applied for the contract advertised by the Rajasthan government’s Department of Information and Public Relations (DIPR) or Rajasthan Samwad through a public notice on June 7, 2024.
The website shows that these firms were the only respondents to the DIPR’s tender which closed on June 18. Its minimum value of procurement was set at Rs one crore.
As per information uploaded on to the website, Asian Films TV and Yellowgate Ventures were rejected by the DIPR on ‘technical grounds’, while ANI Media is shown to have won the contract on ‘financial’ grounds – for having quoted Rs 94 lakhs, which is below the minimum value set by the state government.
Is this a case of conflict of interest, possible bid rigging to deter competition?
As per Zauba Corp which puts out company information based on the Ministry of Corporate Affairs’ records, three directors of ANI Media – Smita Prakash, her husband Sanjeev Prakash Sabharwal and son Ishaan Prakash — are also directors of Asian Films TV Pvt Ltd and Yellowgate Ventures. Another ANI Media director, Prem Prakash, father of Sanjeev Prakash, is also director of Asian Films TV Pvt Ltd.
Sanjeev Prakash is also mentioned as the managing director of both ANI Media and Asian Film TV Pvt Ltd, while official records show Smita Prakash and Ishaan Prakash as directors of both ANI Media and Asian Films TV. Official records also show that the same duo are directors of Yellowgate Ventures Pvt Ltd.
The postal address of the three firms that had bid for the government contract are also linked. ANI Media is located at 6 G Vandana Building, Tolstoy Marg, New Delhi which is the company’s corporate office, while its news agency, ANI News, operates from the ANI Building at R.K. Puram, New Delhi.
The R.K. Puram address of ANI is also listed as the official address of Yellowgate Ventures.
The postal address of Asian Films TV Pvt Ltd is A-16, Gulmohar Park, New Delhi, which, as per the residents directory of the colony, belongs to Sanjeev Prakash and Smita Prakash.
Curiously, the status of Yellowgate Ventures Pvt Ltd is shown on Zauba Corp as ‘strike off’.
Section 37(2) of the Rajasthan Procurement Rules for Goods, Works and Service mentions that a bidder should not have a conflict of interest in the procurement in question. It says:
The State Government considers a conflict of interest to be a situation in which a bidder has interests that could improperly influence its performance of contractual obligations, or compliance with applicable laws and regulations, and that… A bidder may be considered to be in a conflict of interest with one or more parties in the bidding process if, including but not limited to:
(a) have controlling shareholders in common; or
(b) receive or have received any direct or indirect subsidy from any of them; or
(c) have the same legal representative for purposes of the bid; or
(d) have a relationship with each other, directly or through common third parties, that puts them in a position to have access to information about or influence on the bid of another bidder, or influence the decisions of the competent authority regarding the bidding process; or
(e) a bidder participates in more than one bid in the bidding process. participation by a bidder in more than one bid will result in the disqualification of all bids in which it is involved. However, this does not limit the inclusion of the same subcontractor, not otherwise participating as a bidder, in more than one bid…
In public interest, The Wire emailed the following questions to Smita and Sanjeev Prakash on the morning of July 3.
1) This June, three firms including ANI Media had bid for a contract for which a tender was issued by the Rajasthan government’s DIPR (ID No 2024_DIPR_392341_1) on June 7, 2024. It was to provide services for live streaming of the state government’s programmes. ANI Media won the contract to provide the services for a sum of Rs 94 lakhs.
While the government’s records show Smita Prakash as the director of all the three firms that had competed for the contract, Sanjiv Prakash Sabharwal is shown as the managing director of both ANI Media and its competing firm Asian Films TV Pvt Ltd.
In all, four directors of ANI Media – Smita Prakash, Sanjiv Prakash, Ishaan Prakash, and Prem Prakash – are also directors of the competing firms for the contract involving public money.
Additionally, the official addresses of all the three firms are closely linked.
Keeping these facts in mind, including that three closely linked firms were the ONLY bidders for the government contract, my question to both of you is, why should it not be looked at as a case of violating conflict of interest which is prohibited in the Qualification of Bidders section of the Rajasthan Procurement Rules for Goods, Works and Service.
2) Additionally, with directors and managing common between these firms, why should it be not looked at as a possible bid rigging by ANI Media to keep off fair competition?
3) Since the status of Yellowgate Ventures Pvt Ltd is shown on record including in Zauba Corps, a leading website on commercial information drawn from the Ministry of Corporate Affairs, as ‘strike off’, does the company which competed for the government’s contract, now exist in another form?
The Wire has not received a reply from them but will update this story when they respond.
Description of bid rigging in a ‘quick guide’ of Competition Commission
The ‘quick guide’ published by the Competition Advocacy and Awareness Programme of the Competition Commission of India (CCI) provides insights into the patterns of bid rigging.
The CCI was set up by the Union government in 2009 with the aim of eliminating “practices having adverse effect on competition” and to “promote and sustain competition” besides safeguarding the interests of consumers and an environment that allows freedom of trade in the markets of India.
The guide categorically calls bid rigging anti-competitive. It also interchanges bid rigging with “collusive bidding”, while holding up that “if bid rigging takes place in government tenders, it is likely to have severe adverse effects on its purchase and on public spending.”
The guide published to spread awareness about bid ridding, refers to “some suspicious behaviour patterns” of bid rigging while acknowledging that “bid rigging can be difficult to detect”. Among such patterns is, “A party brings multiple bids to a bid opening and submits its bids after coming to know who else is bidding.”
Is Reuters aware?
As per official records, one of the current directors of ANI Media is also Drew Michael Lipshutz. He has been a director of the company since March 2021.
Lipshutz has been the chief financial officer (CFO) of the news agency Reuters since 2022 and is a director of ANI Media by dint of a business agreement between ANI and Reuters for content feed sharing.
The Wire reached out to ascertain if the organisation Thomson Reuters is aware of this particular bid which competed with only two other firms which were floated by the co-directors of ANI Media.
A Reuters spokesperson said, “Reuters announced in December 2022 that it reduced its minority interest in ANI to 26 per cent. It is not involved in the day-to-day management of the company and Mr Lipshutz had no knowledge of this public tender. We would refer you to ANI for any further comment in this matter.”
The spokesperson added, “Reuters is committed to delivering factual, unbiased news in the public interest to the benefit of its customers and audiences worldwide.”
Did Rajasthan government do due diligence?
Given that the overlapping of directors and managing directors of the three firms and their postal addresses having direct links to the directors and/or the companies establish the close link between them, and point to a conflict of interest, it is pertinent to ask if the Rajasthan government did its due diligence before granting the contract to ANI Media. After all, such a contract involves public money.
As mentioned before, the Rajasthan Public Procurement Rules on Procuring Goods, Works and Services categorically states in the section ‘Qualification of Bidders’ that they must “not have a conflict of interest as may be prescribed and specified in the pre-qualification documents, bidder registration documents or bidding documents, which materially affects fair competition.”
The Wire reached out to Sunil Kumar Sharma, the commissioner and joint secretary of the state DIPR, who oversaw the tendering process, through email, for a comment on July 3 morning and also over WhatsApp on July 4. He was specifically asked about the common directorships and addresses shared by the three bidders, the government’s own stipulations about conflict of interest and whether the DIPR had conducted any due diligence before awarding the contract involving public funds to ANI Media in this case.
Sharma has not responded yet. This report will be updated if any response is received.
To get an idea about the tendering process of a government, this correspondent approached retired IAS officer E.A.S. Sarma who had held senior positions in both state and Union governments.
He sad the government official conducting the bids is duty bound to raise a red flag if there is the slightest suspicion of collusive bidding as per official guidelines. In this case, he suggests a red flag should have been raised.
“Tenders are called for to discover the market price of an item or a service through competitive bidding,” he said. “When the bidders collude, it vitiates competition.”
Pointing at the section on conflict of interest in the Rajasthan government’s manual on e-procurement of goods and service which prohibits bid-rigging, Sarma told The Wire, “Bid-rigging indicates either complicity of the bid-issuing authority with the bidder, or outright incompetence involving failure to exercise such due diligence. Any officer caring to safeguard the interests of the government is expected to exercise such due diligence. There can be no excuse for failure to do so.”
He also added, “In case there is collusion between the bid-issuing authority and the bidder, it should be investigated and the concerned officers proceeded against firmly.”
The pre-requisites to win the bid
For this particular contract, the DIPR had set 12 qualifications for the bidders in the tender notice:
- The bidder must be a registered entity in India as a proprietorship/partnership firm or a private limited or a public limited company under the Indian Companies Act or a society registered under the Societies Registration Act, 1958.
- Agency turn over should be Rs 5 crore per year.
- Agency must have served more than two state governments.
- Agency must be registered with the PIB (Press Information Bureau) and DAVP (Directorate of audio visual publication) both.
- Agency must have covered Rajasthan Chief Minister’s event for more than ten years.
- Agency must have all India network for coverage.
- Agency must have produced video news magazine for Rajasthan CM for more than ten years and telecast on Doordarshan.
- Agency must have live video network across the country.
- Agency must have an international coverage facility.
- Agency must have its own studio.
- The bidder must not have been debarred or blacklisted by any of its clients or government of Rajasthan or any of its departments/undertakings.
- The bidder must have PAN number issued by Income Tax Department and GST (Goods and Services Tax) number issued by Central Excise Department.
Even though a media firm can fulfil some of these conditions, what is unlikely to be matched very easily are qualification numbers five and seven which asks for a media firm to have been covering the Rajasthan chief minister’s events for more than 10 years and producing video news magazines for the Rajasthan chief minister for more than 10 years and for them to have been telecast on Doordarshan.
If we look at the last 10 years, ANI Media, by dint of being extremely close to the decade-old Narendra Modi government and the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP), can be called the only news agency to have risen as the primary content provider of various government news and programmes, including video bytes by the party’s chief ministers and exclusive news releases.
Even in states like Rajasthan which has seen a change of governments between the BJP and the Congress in the last decade, ANI Media has been able to wrest such contracts primarily because of a lack of competition in that arena. One of the top news agencies of the country, the Press Trust of India (PTI), has started an audio-visual wing only last year, after a long gap.
Having not been in the field of audio-visual news for long, organisations like PTI Video, therefore, may fail to meet the 10-year qualification criteria set by the Rajasthan government even if it is one of the most trusted news agencies of the country, with an all-India network. The government’s insertions of such qualifications, therefore, ensures bidders do not have a level playing field.
Tweaking qualification criteria
It is not that the Rajasthan government was unaware of this fact. As per its e-procurement website, the authorities tweaked the 10-year rule in another tender, issued on the same date by the DIPR as the earlier tender – June 7, 2024.
That tender was to seek bids from firms to provide services of covering the chief minister’s programmes, production of weekly news magazines, and distribution of the chief minister’s programme coverage news to various channels and its multi-media projects on behalf of the state government.
The website mentions that on the request of PTI Video, and another firm, Softline Studios Private Limited, based out of New Delhi’s Lajpat Nagar, the department decided to relax three of the above mentioned qualifications — numbers 4, 5 and 7.
Curiously though, the information on bidders uploaded on the website after the bid closed on June 28 does not reflect these two firms as bidders.
PTI Video’s response
On being contacted, PTI’s CEO and editor-in-chief Vijay Joshi confirmed to The Wire that it “participated in some tenders floated by the Rajasthan government”.
On being asked why it finally did not end up applying for the bid, he refused to give further information, saying, “We didn’t succeed in winning (the tender). We can offer no further comment on our business operations.”
Softline’s response
This correspondent reached out to Softline too, to ask whether the qualifying criteria still came in its way when it came to applying for the bid.
Sanjay Bansal, director of the company, told The Wire over the telephone, “Yes, they were [in the way]. But for one tender, some of the criteria were relaxed as per our request. We keep applying to many tenders, so I can’t recall why we didn’t finally apply for that particular bid. I will have to ask my team and revert.”
Bansal did not revert.
Second contract goes to ANI Media
As per the Rajasthan government’s e-procurement website, there were four bidders – the same three firms that had bid for the first contract from the house of ANI; and another company named Moulis Advertising Pvt Ltd.
According to Zauba Corp, Moulis’s registered office is in Chennai. The Ministry of Information and Broadcasting records have showed the firm as an empanelled vendor.
As per the Rajasthan government’s notice, the deadline for the second tender was June 26.
On June 28, the e-procurement website announced that the second contract too had gone to ANI Media. More details are awaited, particularly on what grounds Moulis Advertising was rejected by the state government, and also how much ANI Media won the bid for.
The approximate value of the procurement, as per the tender notice on June 7, was Rs 1 crore and twenty lakh (Rs 120 lakh).
