A SaharaReporters review of the federal public payments portal, Govspend, has revealed that Albarka Mulan Catering Services Limited, a company newly incorporated with the Corporate Affairs Commission (CAC), secured federal contracts worth ₦127.7 million within just two months of registration.
Official CAC records show that Albarka was registered on January 20, 2023.
Barely seven weeks later, the company received its first payment of ₦64.8 million on March 9, 2023, from the National Bureau of Statistics (NBS) for “Arc-P stakeholders training hiring of hall for twenty-two days.”
Just 12 days after that, on March 21, 2023, Albarka was again paid ₦62.9 million for the “Arc-P feeding of participants in Sokoto State.”
Speaking on the development, lawyer Awosusi Kehinde described the contracts as a red flag.
Kehinde told SaharaReporters that a situation where a company, barely two or three months old, secures millions of naira in federal contracts is a “financial sham.”
“To win a federal contract, you need your tax clearance certificate, which you cannot get as a three-month-old company. A tax clearance certificate usually consists of returns for a financial year, which the company will be unable to fulfil,” he said.
“It is not just the tax clearance, we also have pensions certificate, NSITF, which should form part of what the company would submit, so the issue is how they would get the document to submit for bidding.”
He reiterated that the move may have amounted to a breach of procurement laws.
“It is hard to bypass the provisions of the law in this regard,” he told SaharaReporters.
In a related development, SaharaReporters earlier reported that another organisation, Swanty 16 Kitchen, was awarded contracts worth N215 million within seven months of registration with the CAC.
All the contracts were awarded to the organisation by the Federal Road Safety Commission (FRSC).
Swanty 16 Kitchen Enterprise was registered on March 15, 2023, according to details available on the CAC business registry portal.
However, less than four months later, on July 12, 2023, it was awarded a contract of N36.74 million for the “Provision of catering services for the feeding of trainees at FRSC training camp Kontagora, Niger State for the Month of June 2023.”
Another sum of N54.362 million was paid to the organisation by the FRSC for the “Feeding of FRSC trainees at Military facilities Kontongora, Niger State for July 2023.”
The payment was made on August 8, 2023.
The commission also paid N52.8 million for the “Provision of catering services for trainees and directing staff at Army training centre, Kontagora, Niger State for the month of August 2023.”
On October 5, 2023, the FRSC made another payment of N59.2 million for catering services at the Kontagora camp.
Similarly, on October 12, 2023, the FRSC paid Swanty 16 Kitchen N11.9 million.