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By KELIN DILLON

Mexico’s state-owned Federal Electricity Commission (CFE) has directly awarded $10 billion in contracts so far during the six-year term of current Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) without allowing for competitive bidding, alleges a new report from daily Mexican newspaper Reforma.

While the CFE purportedly considered allowing bids on the contracts for six priority generation plants at the beginning of AMLO’s term, the electricity company abandoned the competitive bidding process in favor of directly awarding the plants’ total $3.45 billion contracts to its parties of choice.

The CFE reportedly repeated the same direct award process for another group of five plants to the tune of $1.73 billion.

Likewise, the CFE handed the contract for the Puerta del Sureste gas pipeline project directly to TC Energía and Grupo Carso for $4.5 billion and has tapped the same companies to construct the Centauro del Norte gas pipeline for a currently undisclosed amount.

According to industry analysts, the CFE’s anti-bidding methodology creates space for corruption and prevents the government from obtaining the best price-to-quality ratio for a given project.

“What is sought-after is to have the most competitive offer with the lowest cost and within the requested specifications; because if projects are awarded while avoiding competitive processes, we cannot be certain that the project has been assigned to the company with the lower price,” said energy industry expert Carlos Flores.

“The other element to consider is the lack of transparency; we have no details about any of these projects called strategic alliances, only generalities,” added Flores. “It is important because as citizens — through our taxes — we fund the CFE and should receive the information that our money is being used properly.”

Meanwhile, despite directly choosing its constructors, only one of the CFE’s aforementioned six priority plants has been fully built over the course of the last five years, while the rest remain between 61 and 73 percent complete.