PUTRAJAYA, April 17 — Transport Minister Anthony Loke clarified that the RM190 million contract awarded to HeiTech Padu Bhd for servicing and maintenance of the Road Transport Department’s (RTD) MySikap and Mainframe systems, is unrelated to the involvement of Prime Minister Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim’s ex-political secretary, in the company.

The Mainframe serves as the hardware infrastructure supporting MySikap, a data storage software. MySikap stores information related to vehicles and drivers, facilitating online services such as vehicle registration, driving license issuance and road tax renewal that encompasses around 1,300 types of transactions.

In a press conference today, Loke explained that the contract was awarded to HeiTech Padu in February, before Datuk Farhash Wafa Salvador purchased 15.09 per cent of shares in the company in March.

"Meaning the approval was not done yesterday. The approval was given on February 2, 2024. However, as usual, the offer letter will only be issued after several internal processes. However, a decision from the Ministry of Finance (MoF) was made on February 2 and Farhash only bought 15.09 per cent shares in HeiTech Padu on March 16, 2024.

"Meaning the decision on the tender was made even before Farhash bought shares in HeiTech Padu. It has nothing to do with his involvement with this company. The decision was made in early February. So he bought those shares in March, that is individual rights to buy the shares. But what the prime minister wants to stress is that after Farhash became a shareholder in HeiTech Padu, to date, there are no government contracts that were offered to HeiTech Padu,” Loke said.

He stated that Anwar and the Cabinet view the "taunts” towards the government on this issue seriously.

"If any party is not satisfied with this explanation, the prime minister welcomes them to lodge a report with the Malaysian Anti-Corruption Commission (MACC) so that an in-depth investigation can be done,” Loke added.

He explained that of the three companies that took part in the open tender system for the project, HeiTech Padu was found to be most suitable as it offered the lowest pricing at RM185,076,900 not inclusive of service tax, against the project’s ceiling price of RM207,315,469, and had passed all levels of evaluation.

The other two bidders offered RM186,885,611.64 and RM199,513,872. Their names, however, were not revealed to the media.

"So this is clear. Why we offered to HeiTech Padu is because in the tender, they offered the lowest price at RM185,076,900. This matter had also garnered the attention of the prime minister. In the Cabinet meeting this morning, the prime minister had raised this issue and stated that because there are certain parties who were taunting that this contract was awarded to HeiTech Padu, because there is one director or a shareholder in the company who is linked to the prime minister, that is Farhash, who is the former political secretary to Datuk Seri Anwar Ibrahim.

"He (Farhash) is not in the government, and he is not serving in any capacity to the prime minister,” Loke said, when questioned about the possibility of Farhash having prior information about the government’s decision on the contract awarding.

Loke said the contract was awarded for a three-year period, as doing so on an annual basis would cost the government more.

"So normally, these maintenance contracts will indeed be given for a longer period, that is three years. This is a new contract, not an extension. If it is an extension, then it would be yearly,” he added.

Loke also elaborated on the extension of the contract granted to HeiTech Padu. He mentioned that in March last year, the RTD proposed consolidating both the MySikap and Mainframe components into a single tender. This consolidation was to streamline the management of control aspects, monitoring, and overall project management under one company.

During the transitional phase to merge both tenders, the Ministry of Transport (MoT), with approval from the Treasury, extended the servicing contract for Mainframe and MySikap, priced at RM27.29 million for Mainframe and RM27.03 million for MySikap, totalling RM54.32 million.

"It must be stressed here that the contract extension only covered critical service scopes such as preventive maintenance, cybersecurity and renewal of software licence whereby the price of the extended contract is way lower compared to the initial contract.

"This is while we call a tender for extension, so that this service continues, because this service cannot be stopped. MySikap runs 24 hours. It cannot be stopped even for a day,” Loke explained.