The Pretoria High Court has ordered the Department of Health to redo part of a multi-billion rand HIV pill tender. The case was brought by local drug maker Cipla Medpro Manufacturing.
Acting Judge Graham Girdwood found several irregularities in the awards for one-month and three-month packs of ARV pills. He set those awards aside and said they were unlawful and unconstitutional.
The judge gave the department 120 days to redo the split and award of the two items, GroundUp reported.
The pills combine tenofovir, lamivudine and dolutegravir. This is the first-choice ARV treatment for adults in South Africa. Millions of people take the three drugs, usually in one pill a day.
The full ARV tender is worth R15.5 billion and came into effect in December 2025. Of that, R12.6 billion is for the combined pills in one-month and three-month packs.
Cipla did not win any award for those packs. It only got three smaller awards worth R215 million.
To avoid a shortage, current suppliers will keep delivering for now. The court order will only take effect 90 days after the department finalises the new awards.
The judge ordered that the bids of Innovata Pharmaceuticals and Viatris Healthcare be left out of the new process. He found they did not have a valid licence for their Isando factory when bids closed.
“A licence that has expired is not, and was not on bid closure date, a valid licence,” Girdwood said.
Innovata had earlier failed to deliver under a past contract and had asked the department to cancel it. Even so, it was given an 11.38% share of the tender.
“Formal debarment is reserved for the most serious cases of established wrongdoing and is not a precondition for, nor a proxy for, an assessment of ordinary supply-performance risk,” the judge said.
He also found that the department accepted ownership claims from Innovata and Barrs Pharmaceuticals without checking them. These claims earned them extra points and pushed up their rankings. The court ordered that their scores be adjusted.
Innovata and Barrs are both owned by Avacare. They went into business rescue in December 2025 and left it this year. Days after entering business rescue, Barrs ran out of stock of both items it was meant to supply.
The judge ordered the department to investigate whether Innovata and Barrs colluded in their bids. He said the department should have looked into this before giving both firms large volumes.
The final prices of Barrs and Aurobindo Pharma must go back to their prices before talks, where they did not qualify for local manufacturing preference. The judge also found bidders were not judged on the same rules for local manufacturing status.
Hetero Drugs South Africa also went to court, asking for its own bid to be looked at again. The judge dismissed its case.
He said the department had a “reasonable, rational suspicion of collusive bidding” involving Hetero and other companies. He said the review was not the place to decide if Hetero had actually colluded.
Hetero did not take part in the hearing. The judge ordered it to pay the other parties’ legal costs on a punitive scale. The minister and director-general must pay Cipla’s costs.
Source: this article is based on reporting by Moneyweb. Image: Moneyweb. Written with the help of AI and published by the Tzaneen Voice Business desk. See our Editorial Standards.
Anelisa Nkuna covers business and money news for Tzaneen Voice. Anelisa reports on the rand, fuel prices, interest rates, jobs, Eskom, Transnet, farming and company results. The aim is simple: explain what the numbers mean for household budgets, small businesses and workers in South Africa.