The Public Security Ministry has recommended awarding the contract to personalise 3.15 million Sri Lankan e-passports to French-Sri Lankan joint venture Thales DIS Finland Oy/Just in Time (JIT), the Sunday Times reported, citing concerns that the proposed pricing structure could leave the Department of Immigration and Emigration (DIE) exposed to a “vendor lock-in trap.”
Under the tender — formally titled “Procurement of Issuance System and Relevant Public Key Infrastructure components for personalisation of e-Passports” — Thales/JIT would buy, install and maintain all the hardware at its own initial cost, recovering the outlay through monthly per-passport fees over a five-year term or until 3,150,000 passports are issued, whichever comes first.
At contract end, ownership of the servers, security appliances, workstations and proprietary hardware security modules transfers to the DIE. But the bidding pricing schedule did not require bidders to quote post-contract software licence renewals, the newspaper found by examining the procurement documents.
During the pre-bid clarification phase, prospective bidders had asked DIE how to price the post-contract licence renewals, noting that the rate card and price schedule did not include a section for it. DIE’s published response was that “after contract period ends or after hand over, employer [DIE] will be responsible for license renewals.”
“By accepting the hardware without a pre-negotiated software licensing agreement, the DIE is walking directly into a textbook ‘vendor lock-in’,” an expert with inside knowledge of the process told the Sunday Times, on condition of anonymity. The vendor would be “granted absolute pricing power” over the software needed to run the public-key infrastructure once the contract expired.
The recommendation, if confirmed, contradicts Public Security Minister Ananda Wijepala’s May 7 statement to Parliament that “no tender has been awarded so far,” responding at the time to Sarvajana Balaya leader Dilith Jayaweera’s May 6 allegation of irregularities in the procurement.
The procurement structure consolidates pricing into a single line item for the full 3,150,000-passport volume, rather than requiring an itemised hardware and software breakdown.
