MPs’ laptops under K550 000 each—Parliament

Parliament says the laptops it has purchased for its 193 members of Parliament (MPs) recently were not valued at K1.1 million each, but below K550 000 per laptop computer.

The Parliament Secretariat in Lilongwe has made the clarification in reaction to a May 22 front page article in The Nation under the headline ‘MPs get K1.1m laptops each’.

Parliament spokesperson Leonard Mengezi said the preferred bidder,  Globe Computer Systems Limited, was picked from among 10 suppliers because its price was the lowest at K112 131 250 for the laptop consignment.

He said: “This supplier’s quotes, without factoring in value-added tax [VAT], were K450 000 for an HP laptop and K470 000 for a Dell machine. If you factor in VAT, at 16.5 percent, each HP machine was bought at K524 250, while each Dell machine was secured at K547 550.”

He said that the computers were a budget item and were distributed to facilitate parliamentarians’ work.

Parliament also said three of the 193 computers were not delivered because of vacancies in three constituencies.

Globe Computer Systems director of operations, Geoffrey Msampha, said the company is price competitive. n