The workers of the Central Bank of Nicaragua (BCN) have a special menu of meals throughout the year that comes from the coffers of the State. The juicy contract is for 5 million 906 thousand 768 córdobas and covers a total of eight months, from May to December 2022, according to the document consulted by Article 66 available on the website of the Electronic Administrative Contracting System (SISCAE) of Nicaragua Buy.
The millionaire contract guarantees breakfast, lunch and dinner from Monday to Friday for all BCN workers, according to the document. In total, 33,600 lunches will be served at a cost of 140 cordobas each, totaling 4,704,000 cordobas; 440 lunches on Saturdays and Sundays for 62 thousand 720 cordobas; 1,680 breakfasts from Monday to Sunday for a value of 184,800 cordobas and the same number of dinners for the same cost. To this should be added the Value Added Tax (VAT) for an amount of 770 thousand 448 córdobas.
The menu is defined in the contract assigned last May 5 to the Crowne Plaza Hotel, which operates under the name of “Nicaragua Hotel Company, Limited Company.” The weekly menu is divided as follows:
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Monday: Beef soup, high rib, chicken, chicken with meatballs, cheese or other type of soup; a type of meat, garnish, salad, provisions and soft drink. Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday: Two types of meat, side dish, salad, provisions and soft drink. Friday: An international food dish that could be typical, Mexican, Italian, Spanish, Chinese or other.
The Central Bank is very demanding with the feeding of its workers and the schedules, it has stipulated the schedules in which the meal times must be served: breakfast from 7:30 to 8:00 am; lunch from 11:30 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. and dinner from 5:00 p.m. to 6:00 p.m.
In addition, it has a section on “adequate technical specifications” that it demands from the Crowne Plaza Hotel, such as not recycling or reusing the “leftovers” of each service, carrying out a swab test on the staff that attends to its workers in the dining room and the most striking is that «The seasoning and quality of the food presented in the tasting must be maintained during the term of the contract».
And it is that the menu that they serve to the workers of the BCN went through an approval process that included three people who would be in charge of a tasting to give the go-ahead and initiate the hiring. They could not eat anything or adjust to a meager budget as the vast majority of Nicaraguan households do with precarious salaries and the prices of the basic food basket through the air.
End of the year banquet is already guaranteed
The BCN’s New Year’s Eve party is already in process, since March of this year they assigned the contract for the 300-person buffet to the “Nicaragua Hotel Company, Sociedad Anónima”, the same one that supplies them with the three meal times from Monday to Friday. The end of the year feast will cost Nicaraguans 347,936.25 córdobas, according to the document available on the Nicaragua Compra website.
The event will be on December 16 at 12:00 pm and will last three hours. Includes buffet lunch for each person, four sandwiches and uncorked drinks. For this event, the Central Bank requested that the tables be for 10 people, half with gold tablecloths and the rest in red; that the chairs are dressed in white, half with red bows and the other part with gold bows.
The end of the year lunch will be with an international menu of two types of salads, two types of white or red meat, two types of side dishes, two types of desserts, sauces, rolls, butter and sweet and savory sandwiches. While the majority of households in the country subsist on the minimum wage, the Central Bank of Nicaragua is in charge of organizing year-end celebrations for its employees with state money paid by all Nicaraguans with their taxes.
