ABU DHABI: A Syrian agency re-issued two tenders yesterday, seeking quantities of rice and sugar it has repeatedly tried and failed to obtain since June.
The General Foreign Trade Organisation (GFTO) said it was seeking to buy 276,000 tonnes of white sugar and 135,000 tonnes of white short grain rice in two separate tenders citing extreme urgency. The deadline for sugar offers is November 27, while that for rice was November 26, according to tender documents.
“These are the same tenders that we have announced before, the only thing that is different are the dates but the conditions remain the same,” a GFTO official said. “No purchases were made in the previous ones,” he said. This is the fourth time Syria is asking for the same amount of sugar and rice with the same conditions.
Traders have said Syria should relax its tender terms in light of the risk involved in doing business with a country embroiled in civil war, particularly the requirement to place a ¤1m ($1.4m) bid bond. A bid bond is a form of guarantee which tender participants must give to ensure they will deliver under the terms of their offer.
Both tenders state payment can be arranged using Syrian funds frozen abroad. Traders have said they were uncertain whether they would become liable to pay the bid bond if there were problems with arranging finance from funds in the frozen bank accounts. The state grain agency Hoboob said that it concluded a deal to import 500,000 tonnes of wheat of which around 150,000 tonnes had arrived in Syria. Reuters
