The new minister of Secom (Secretariat of Social Communication of the Presidency), said this Tuesday (14) that he intends to prepare a new tender for digital communication, still this semester, after , whose contract was valued at R$ 197.7 million.
“I intend to place a new bid. It is no longer worth [a anterior]we are not interested, we will work on it immediately”, he told journalists at Palácio do Planalto, .
The new notice, already in preparation, should be launched in the first quarter. The option for a new tender is so that there is no suspicion about the fairness of the dispute, after the suspension and revocation of the tender carried out in 2024 under the administration of the predecessor, (PT).
“I was always very calm that there was no type of irregularity in that bid,” Pimenta told reporters, shortly before Sidônio.
In August last year, the government () revoked Secom’s bid of R$ 197.7 million amid a process by the TCU (Federal Audit Court) on suspicion of breach of secrecy of the proposals of the companies competing for the contract .
Although the process was still ongoing, the government decided to revoke the tender. When publishing the decision in an extra edition of the Official Gazette in August, Secom cited “reasons of convenience and opportunity”.
The same publication, signed by the interim minister of Secom, Laércio Portela, opened a period of three working days for the winning companies to present an appeal.
At the time, Pimenta was heading the Extraordinary Ministry of Support for Reconstruction of Rio Grande do Sul, created in response to the floods in the state.
Pimenta defended the continuation of the contracts, but the interim minister opted for revocation. Laércio will be the new Press Secretary of the Presidency under Sidônio.
A representation was forwarded to the TCU after suspected leaks from the victorious companies.
On the eve of the announcement of the winners of the contest, in April, the initials of the companies that would win were published, in encrypted form, on social media: Usina Digital, Área Comunicação, Moringa L2W3 and the BR e Tal consortium.
Afterwards, Moringa and the Comunicação Area were disqualified in the process. And then Clara Digital and the Boas Ideias consortium entered.
The Public Ministry together with the TCU asked for the dispute to be overturned. “I believe that the facts narrated in this representation, in themselves, are extremely serious and demand immediate action from this court in order to prevent the contract from taking place possibly riddled with an irremediable defect, or even due to a typical fact to be investigated in the competent sphere “, stated minister Aroldo Cedraz when ordering the suspension, in July.
Parliamentarians opposing the Lula government, such as senators (PL-RN) and Flávio Bolsonaro (PL-RJ), also asked the TCU to suspend the competition.
In a note released in July, Pimenta denied that there were irregularities in the process. He stated that the suspicions were raised by “political and economic” interests.
“The complaints presented to the control body against the continuation of the aforementioned bidding are clearly driven by political and economic interests, since the court’s own auditors recognized the insufficiency of elements to grant the precautionary measure that suspends the process”, he argued to era.
On Thursday (9), five days before Sidônio took office, the TCU rapporteur determined the. In the decision, he recalled that the tender had been revoked and said that “there are no obstacles to Secom/PR promoting the contracting of the service object of the tender in question, taking advantage of the acts carried out in the previous tender, in its judgment and in what fits.”
