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Paraguay’s Development Bank Pays $597,000 for “Patches” After Shelving Its Own Tender Image: Gentileza
🇵🇾 Paraguay /Technology

Paraguay’s Development Bank Pays $597,000 for “Patches” After Shelving Its Own Tender

From ABC Color · () Spanish

Translated from Spanish and summarized by DistantNews. Read the original for the full story.

At a glance

News Documents & data Approved/passed
  • Paraguay’s Banco Nacional de Fomento awarded a G. 3.54 billion, or about $597,727, contract without a public tender for four x86 servers.
  • The bank cited an urgent need after its aging VMware infrastructure collapsed, but the national procurement authority said the deterioration was foreseeable and could have been planned for.
  • The new contract costs nearly three times the 2023 award for the same servers, while a separate core-banking project remains unresolved after three years.

Paraguay’s Banco Nacional de Fomento paid nearly three times its earlier price for the same type of servers after shelving a public procurement process that had already begun.

The bank directly awarded a G. 3.54 billion contract, equivalent to about $597,727, to the Consorcio de Infraestructura Tecnológica, formed by Informática Paraguaya SA and Netlogic SRL. The exception procedure covered four x86 servers and cited an “unavoidable urgency.”

unavoidable urgency

— Banco Nacional de FomentoThe bank used this wording to justify the exceptional procurement procedure.

The dispute dates to a 2023 tender for the same equipment. The bank had awarded that contract to Informática Paraguaya for G. 1.28 billion, but Paraguay’s National Directorate of Public Procurement blocked it after finding that the evaluation committee had arbitrarily disqualified a competitor over processors described as not being “latest generation.” The processors remained current, according to the account.

latest generation

— Banco Nacional de Fomento evaluation committeeThe phrase was used to disqualify a competing bidder in the 2023 tender.

Instead of correcting the evaluation, the bank froze the process. Its aging VMware virtualization system continued operating on hardware from 2014 until it collapsed on Jan. 26, 2026, when CPU usage reached 100%. The bank then used the failure to justify an emergency purchase. The procurement authority rejected that reasoning, warning that the deterioration had been foreseeable and could have been planned.

The x86 purchase also does not resolve the bank’s broader technology problem. Its core-banking tender, launched three years ago, remains undecided and requires software to run on IBM Power10 servers the bank already owns. The article presents the direct purchase as a costly stopgap while the central modernization project continues to be delayed.

foreseeable and capable of being planned for

— National Directorate of Public ProcurementThe procurement authority criticized the bank’s justification for the emergency purchase.
About this summary

Originally published by ABC Color in Spanish. Translated, summarized, and contextualized automatically by DistantNews, with a note on how the source frames the story. Not individually reviewed before publishing. How this works.

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