Financial Monitoring Agency Uncovers Price Gouging in Public Procurement Worth Nearly 4 Billion Tenge

Deputy Chair of the Financial Monitoring Agency (FMA), Kairat Bizhanov, has reported violations in Kazakhstan’s public procurement system conducted through the Omarket platform, Orda.kz reports.

To ensure transparency and reduce the risk of theft, the Omarket.kz platform was created. It is used for public procurement of goods worth up to 100 MCI. The system automatically compares price offers and awards the order to the supplier offering the lowest price. While the process appears fully transparent, we periodically discover discrepancies between initial and actual prices. For example, the price of ordinary packaging tape ranges from 2 tenge to 99,000 tenge per piece — a difference of nearly 50,000 times, Bizhanov said.

According to him, such manipulations are used to artificially inflate average prices. In 7,500 cases, price offers were deleted immediately after the contracts were signed.

A selective audit of 8,000 contracts worth 8.3 billion tenge revealed overpricing totaling nearly 4 billion tenge. In addition, investigators identified cases where products did not comply with technical specifications.

Original Author: Artyom Volkov