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The House of Representatives on Monday opened the tender for a much-criticized project to build a new office tower for legislators — and immediately found itself in yet more controversy.

The tender, which legislators had previously insisted would be transparent, flopped on its first day when it turned out the House had failed to set up a counter where bidders could register.

Uchok Sky Khadafi, from the Indonesian Forum for Budget Transparency (Fitra), said this latest fiasco only strengthened the suspicion that the House Secretariat General, which is in charge of the budget for the project, had already chosen the contractors.

“The current bidding process is being faked to fool the public,” he alleged. “They’ve already got the project winner’s names in their hand.”

He added that earlier statements by the House’s Household Affairs Committee (BURT), which is overseeing the project, that state-owned contractors were preferable to private contractors virtually ensured that “this project has been won by a state-owned company. Any other company will lose the tender.”

Refrizal, a BURT deputy chairman, had said the bidding would be open to all construction companies, but that the committee would prefer if the project were won by state-owned contractors.

“I mean, what if the project were won by private contractors and they ran away with the money before finishing the project? That’s a dangerous risk,” Refrizal said two weeks ago.

Uchok also cited a Fitra survey that he said found several major construction companies were unwilling to participate in the tender because they were aware of the “real scenario.”

They are also avoiding the tender because of the political and legal risks inherent in the project, he said.

“No qualified company will join the bidding process because the project has been widely criticized by the public,” he said.

“If they make just a little mistake in the process, they’ll come under scrutiny from the KPK,” he added, referring to the Corruption Eradication Commission, which has been invited to monitor the entire project.

The tender was advertised in a local newspaper on Sunday, inviting contractors to bid on individual packets in the Rp 1.2 trillion ($136.8 million) project. The companies have been given until March 24 to register their bids at the House’s building and landscaping office.

However, when the Jakarta Globe visited the office on the second floor of the current House building, there was no counter for bidders to pick up registration forms, as promised in the advertisement.

There were also no posted notices of how and where bidders could register.