Sovereign Wealth Fund Samruk-Kazyna is introducing a number of changes to the procurement mechanism conducted by the Fund. This was announced today at the site of the press center of the Government by the Managing Director for Operating at Samruk-Kazyna JSC, Alisher Pirmetov.

According to Alisher Pirmetov, innovations include seven key tasks in improvement of the procurement system:

1. Optimization of intercompany purchases;
2. Control of pricing;
3. Changing the procedure for prequalification;
4. Appeals body on preliminary qualification selection;
5. Enhancement of procurement control through in-house audit;
6. Consideration of violations on the Fund Commission;
7. The new e-procurement platform — ISEP 2.0.

The list of goods, works and services that can be purchased within the framework of intercompany cooperation has been reduced by more than 10 times.

"Thus, the list, which previously covered 4.5 thousand items, was reduced to 424. This means that the nomenclature of procurement for third-party suppliers is increased by more than 4 thousand items," Alisher Pirmetov emphasized.

The subjects of small and medium businesses have the opportunity to receive additional orders for 300 billion tenge, which were previously purchased by the intercompany system.

"This will give us, first, the expansion of the competitive environment. By expanding the competitive environment, we can improve the requirements for the goods, work and services delivered. The second is to save the money that will be spent on purchasing goods, works and services," Alisher Pirmetov said.

In order to exclude the abuse of overvaluation of prices, a mechanism is provided to compulsorily determine market average prices for the purchase of goods worth more than 50 000 MCI (120 250 000 tenge) within the framework of intercompany cooperation.

"For the remaining 424 positions, a marketing system will be introduced. That is, the price of these or other goods, works and services will be formed on the basis of prices prevailing in the market. We will not allow these price caps to be exceeded, we will monitor pricing in purchases," Alisher Pirmetov explained.

In addition, a number of changes have been developed for the prequalification procedure. Procurement by the way of requesting price proposals through prequalification will be excluded.

"The system is very transparent. It does not allow participation of one-day firms in competitions. Nevertheless, there are certain procedures that are necessary for SMEs to pass through, including questionnaires. It should be noted that we are reducing the number of issues almost twice, which significantly reduces the time for business entities and for us, customers, when considering them," the managing director explained.

Also, to increase the transparency of the prequalification process, it is proposed to set up an appeal commission to consider complaints involving representatives of the Fund, Atameken NCE and independent auditors.

The transition to a single purchasing platform of ISEP 2.0 will allow it to integrate with state registers and databases, to implement the transition to electronic documents and technologies.

Summarizing the work done, the managing director of Samruk-Kazyna JSC  noted that today measures have been taken to ensure transparency and availability of the procurement system. In general, according to the speaker, the procurement system of Samruk-Kazyna JSC will move forward one step further. However, this is not the limit, work in this direction will continue.