Five years after buying it, the Costa Rican state-owned electric company Racsa decided to close Fullmovil, a virtual operator dedicated to the commercialization of prepaid telephony services.
In February 2014, the Superintendence of Telecommunications announced that Radiográfica Costarricense - already in serious financial difficulties - acquired Fullmóvil, a virtual operator involved in the sale of paid telephony services.
An alarming trend has been confirmed on the government of Costa Rica involving self-supply between institutions and public companies under contracts that avoid the participation of private enterprises.
EDITORIAL
The legal tangle that regulates state purchases in Costa Rica is a machine that forces to go out on a pilgrimage in order to acquire, for example, electronic bracelets for prisoners.
There is a striking difference between the offers received by the Ministry of Finance in Costa Rica, in a competition which was held exclusively between state entities in order to avoid mandatory controls on public procurements.
EDITORIAL
In Costa Rica, there is a new phenomenon not seen before: the illogical is no longer surprising, and, what is worse, the unexplainable is accepted as normal.
Consumers money is still being used to fund losses by the state-owned internet service provider, which have exceeded $100 million in the last six years.
At the expense of consumers - via prices for energy and telecommunications- Costa Rica is still keeping running state enterprises whose inefficiency has been proven. This time, Nacion.com reported that the Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) covered the losses of Radiographic Costarricense (RACSA) with lending and a capital injection to that subsidiary.
State institutions avoid competition between telecoms companies by hiring telecommunications services, without using tender processes and without time limits, from the state run Instituto Costarricense de Electricidad and Radiográfica Costarricense.
Instead of creating tenders to generate healthy competition between telecommunications operators and to find the best cost / benefit ratio, as all private companies do, state institutions renew agreements with the state run ICE and RACSA despite the market opening of the telecommunications industry, regardless of price or terms of service that they offer.
Information about salaries of officials at the state run telecoms company has been released, which include the more than $4000 a month paid to a chauffeur.
EDITORIAL
An article in Prensalibre.cr reports that "... deputy Otto Guevara unveiled the list of salaries of 22000 officials working in the Costa Rican Electricity Institute (ICE) and Radiographic Costarricense (RACSA) and National Power and Light Company (CNFL), which included details of a light vehicle chauffer earning ¢2,132,854 ($4,000) a month. It also highlighted the 854,000 colones ($1,600) paid to a floral arranger and 6 million colones ($11,200) a month received by a public accountant and auditor, while a human resources assistant earns 3,372,536 ($6,300). "
The new system which has to unify purchases made by the Costa Rican government has been put in the hands of a company characterized by spectacular failures in its management and in the projects it has undertaken.
EDITORIAL
The importance of good management of public procurements is vital in any economy. And not just because of the direct economic impact it has on state finances, but because a system that does not promote transparency of processes and competition among suppliers causes the general productive economy to suffer as a result of the distortions that occur in the market, which is not governed by the competitiveness of products and services, but by cronyism.
Costa Rica's state telecom company plans to reach viability as a company competing with the private sector in logistics services, data centers, and in the area of Digital Government.
This will be a new attempt to recover the positive numbers of Radiographic Costarricense, whose new portfolio of products aims to compete with private companies that have over twenty years of experience in the market.
Two months after having announced a new platform to centralize purchases of goods and services from the State, the contract with the state telecom company Racsa is still "under review".
After several months of discussion about which system should be chosen in order to centralize government purchasing procedures, the Ministry of Finance announced in January the creation of a new platform , which would be based on the operating system Mer-Link and would be developed by RACSA. However, the new system is still on hold and purchases are still being made using the previous two platforms, Mer-Link and CompraRed.