The company Efraim Nessin Varzan Capuya was awarded for a total value of G. 1,500,000,000 for the rental of a building for the MEC offices. The ministry carried out the call for bids under the category of Real Estate Acquisition and Lease.
The award process was carried out by the type of Contracting by Exception procedure and in this way, the aforementioned firm was the only beneficiary and presented for the process.
Only one item was awarded within the process, within which the following hierarchical levels are highlighted: rental of commercial, industrial facilities or halls; leasing or rental of property or buildings; real estate services; professional business and administrative management services.
QUESTIONS
The Ministry of Education has several buildings that can be used by the institution for its addresses. One of them is the Excelsior building, which was acquired by the portfolio, but has been abandoned for years and is not used for the use of the MEC.
excelsior building
On the other hand, with a 95% construction process, there is the “Government Offices” project, which contains the highest tower, with 16 floors, which belongs to the MEC. This, without mentioning that the MEC has another series of complexes already used, such as the case of the Marcopolo Building, with 59 addresses, the La Casona Building, with 19, and the Colonial Building, with 8, just to mention a few.
government offices
EXPLANATIONS
According to the explanations of Ricardo González, Location Assistant of the MEC, the rent made corresponds to the urgency of distributing to a large number of existing dependencies in the educational portfolio, which can only be housed in a sufficiently large complex such as the case of the building belonging to Efraim Nessin.
“We have a great lack of physical spaces, for which we rent between 3 to 4 dependencies to maximize our places. We have been working with the Efraim Nessin firm for approximately 11 years and most of the MEC Archives sector is located there”, the spokesperson declared.
There is also the Directorate of Academic Certification, the Department of Tariffs, the General Directorate of Legal Advice, Legalizations, among others. According to the specifications of the location assistant, Archives is the area that requires the most expansion, and the Efraim Nessin building is the only one that has the requested size.
“We don’t have enough buildings of our own, so we rent other complexes to have the possibility of maximizing our spaces. In fact, we still need more,” González determined.
Regarding the query as to why the space of the Excelsior building is not being used, the spokesperson commented that it needs some repairs, but expressed that it is not up to him to indicate why it is not being done to avoid extra investments.
“Finding spaces of this magnitude is very difficult and expensive for us, not to mention the cost that the transfer of our addresses also requires,” said the Location assistant.
Likewise, the spokesperson remarked that the educational portfolio has a very low budget regarding the acquisition of buildings for its addresses, for which they are renting several complexes and also lowering the rental costs of all its dependencies.
Previously, the rental cost of the Efraim Nessin building, which was previously around G. 1,850 million and has now been acquired for G. 1,500 million.
