A regional vehicle inspection company is facing blacklisting in Kenya, just months after Tanzania terminated its contract.

Kenya’s Public Procurement Regulatory Authority (PPRA) is in the process of blacklisting Japanese-owned EAA Company Ltd for allegedly using forged documents to bid for a $13 million motor vehicle and spare parts inspection tender.

If the debarment goes through, the company will only have operations in Uganda, where it has a contract with the Uganda National Bureau of Standards.

Kenya Bureau of Standards (Kebs) has asked the PPRA to start the debarment process against EAA on the strength of investigation reports that implicated it.

The company has been fighting in the courts to have the blacklisting held off.

While EAA was unsuccessful in its bid to win the inspection tender in Kenya, investigative agencies latched on to the company’s tender documents after the Auditor General flagged inaccuracies allegedly filed with Kebs in 2014.

Five Kenyan government agencies separately concluded EAA used forged documents to bid for the Ksh1.5 billion($13.6 million)-a-year tender, with Directorate of Criminal Investigations (DCI) being the latest to return the damning verdict.

The DCI opened investigations into EAA last year after the Auditor General, the National Assembly’s Public Investments Committee and the PPRA claimed that the firm used forged documents in its bid to win the tender.

The DCI recommended that officials of the firm be charged in court with forgery.

Earlier this year, Tanzania terminated its contract, opting to inspect used motor vehicles and spare parts at the port of entry rather than use private firms overseas to handle the approval process.

The PPRA debarment committee, sitting in Nairobi, announced a three-year ban on EAA in June after ruling that the firm falsified documents in different bids placed between 2011 to 2019 for Pre-Export Verification of Conformity tenders. During a special forensic audit by the Auditor General, anomalies were found on the documents submitted by EAA and another firm, Auto Terminal Japan (ATJ).

The Auditor General found that EAA and ATJ forged documents that gave them a global presence and an older date of incorporation. Consequently, the Auditor General recommended that both be blacklisted.

The same were adopted by the Public Investment Committee of the Kenyan National Assembly in October, 2020.

In June 2021, the debarment committee slapped EAA with a three-year ban from government tenders in Kenya. But ATJ obtained a court injunction against PPRB to stop being debarred until the determination of its case.

EAA in March tried to stop the debarment by filing a suit at Kenya’s High Court and Justice Jairus Ngaah allowed it to proceed with the suit, but declined to issue temporary orders barring implementation of the PPRA’s decision.

Two weeks ago, KEBS wrote to the PPRA, seeking to have the firms blacklisted.

“Pursuant to section 22 (1) a of the public procurement and asset disposal regulations of 2020, a request for debarment may be initiated by the accounting officer of a procuring entity, or any other person with knowledge or facts that may support one or more grounds for debarment. In view of the foregoing, this is to request the authority to start the debarment process of the above mentioned two companies (EAA, ATJ)," Kebs said in its letter to the PPRA.

Kebs says that the debarment request is based on the DCI probe.

EAA, while suing to stop debarment, said that the PPRA’s blacklist could affect several contracts it has with other countries in and out of East Africa.

EAA is an accredited company with the scope of third-party inspection accreditation Type A ISO 17020 for inspections by the Japanese Accreditation Board (JAB), which also cancelled EAA’s certificate in 2015 for alleged malpractice. The firm changed its name in 2017 from East Africa Automobile Services Company Ltd to EAA as part of its rebranding strategy to get business out of the region.

Prior to the name change, the company says it took inspection services in Uganda, Tanzania and Zanzibar.