Bulgaria

Bulgaria

În cele ce urmează vă prezentăm secvenţe din interviul cu adjunctul Comandantului Forţelor Aeriene ale Bulgariei, generalul Rumen Radev, pe tema procesului de achiziţie a avioanelor multirol.

Radev spune că nu s-a luat încă o decizie finală, deşi aşa se înţelegea din declaraţiile din ultima vreme ale ministrului Anyu Angelov, ba mai mult… generalul bulgar declară că unele ţări şi-au îmbunătăţit semnificativ ofertele.

Rumen Radev said that for
over a year there has been no significant improvement in the supplier
countries’ delivery of new technical and financial information. “I can now
gladly say that in the recent months when we secured transparency and
openness and sent a document to the countries to present more information.
This document led to extremely fruitful and promising results during the
talks. It seems some of the countries expected more clear information and
conditions on the development of the process in order to significantly
optimize their offers.

The meetings with the MoDs of the supplier countries took place on Feb
14-15 with Italy, Feb 24-25 with Portugal and the US and Feb 28-March 1
with Sweden. The talks with Italy were led by Deputy Minister of Defense
Valentin Radev and the rest were led by me.”

Asked what new information they got from the different countries Radev
said: “Without disclosing concrete parameters I can say that there is a
significant improvement in some of the proposals. Despite the insufficient
time to react, the countries we held talks with were very serious in their
participation in the project. In this way and thanks also to the
persistence of our team, we were also able to make significant progress in
optimizing the offers and acquiring more information for objective
analysis.

We can see a reduction in the total price in the offers of some of the
countries. What is more, in one of the offers the integration of equipment
will be for free. In the beginning that country wanted us to pay a
significant sum for that.

We also managed to improve the parameters on the payment schemes. One
example is with an offer which initially did not give us any payment
scheme. That country is now offering us a long-term payment plan and a
grace period.  Gripen and Eurofighter made a decisive step towards our
requirements for technical maintenance through increasing the time
intervals for inspections and securing the supply of the needed technical
equipment and high qualification of our engineers which would decrease the
expenses. They also presented part of the missing information about the
technical, tactical and operative characteristics of the aircraft.

No final decision has been taken by the military experts, this cannot
happen at the present stage of the process. This is because there is a
significant difference between the information we got from the initial RFI
and the one we got during the talks. However, we still haven’t gotten some
of the information on the important technical and tactical characteristics
of the aircraft which makes the final decision difficult.  But it is of
utter importance that the candidate countries demonstrate serious
intentions in optimizing their proposals by reducing the price, offering
payment schemes, free integration of equipment and arms and adapting the
systems for4 technical support. Considering that, they asked for more time
to prepare a final offer and it is expected that they will be ready this
month.

We are now waiting for Italy to present additional optimization of its
offer especially in terms of the initial logistics package, technical
support and exploitation costs. We are also waiting for an optimization of
the logistics package of the US for F-16 MLU. In the case of F-16 we think
that we have a chance to significantly decrease the price through used
equipment and joint use of equipment and utilities with the US Air Force at
Graf Ignatievo Air Base. Sweden proposed a meeting of experts from Bulgaria
and Sweden this month in which the requirements of Bulgaria will be
detailed so that their offer is better structured and optimized in
technical and financial terms. During the last meeting Sweden again
confirmed its serious intentions to offer big offset programmes and
presented information on that. Although those are not of my team’s
competence, the proposals should be presented to the respective ministries.*

We should consider all the offers with great seriousness so that we choose
the best offer for Bulgaria.”

Sursa: Pan.bg

Copy+paste în viteză şi mai ales în lipsă de timp.