Tonight we continue looking at a leaked BDF tender document. Yes, we have shown you screenshots for the thousands of sub-ten-thousand-dollar payments that politically connected suppliers have received.
But the tender document exposes the quite incredible volume of meat that was paid for to be supplied to the BDF. And the sheer volume of it does raise eyebrows. We're talking half a million pounds of only meat per year, while the prices paid would make anyone hang their head.
Jules Vasquez has been drilling down in the numbers and here's his report:
How much meat can the BDF eat? That is the question.
This leaked tender document shows that in 2023/2024, they were consuming 42,190 pounds per month-along with 16 buckets of pigtail.
Now, let's say they are feeding 1,000 soldiers daily at their bases-and it is not nearly that many-then everyone would have to be eating about one and a half pounds of meat per day, which is excessive and way above average consumption-which is maybe 6 ounces. And we also know that the soldiers out in the field are eating like this: canned sausage and rice and beans.
Most of the meat purchased for the BDF was whole chicken: 25,520 pounds per month. That works out to an incredible 306,240 in a single year-a figure so large it boggles the mind.
And the prices they are paying for those meats are also questionable. We already showed you how these baby back ribs in 2026 are still cheaper than what they were paying for in 2023.
And, the same for chicken. The politically favored Kukulcan was selling it to the BDF for $3.00 per pound in 2023, when in 2026-after all the recent price increases-Quality Poultry is selling it wholesale for $2.68 per pound right now.
Now the difference may seem marginal, but when you work it out over thousands of pounds it adds up to almost a hundred thousand dollars in savings that could have been realized if the Ministry of Defence was purchasing from a real supplier instead of a politically connected shell company.
The price difference-if compared to today's prices-is $97,414.80, suggesting that buying the same quantity of whole chicken in 2026 would cost almost 100k less.
In 2023, Three Star-a long-established real meat and poultry business with multiple storefronts-sold chicken to the Ministry of Defence at $2.95 per pound, but they were only contracted to provide 970 pounds per month while Kukulcan-a company co-owned by the then Minister of Defense's secretary, and formally registered in 2021-provided 24,550 pounds. And that company owns no poultry farms, is not a registered poultry producer-basically, a middleman with a political connect contracted to provide chicken-tens of thousands of pounds of it-at above-market prices.
In 2023, if Three Star-which quoted $2.95 per pound, which is still expensive-had provided the full amount, Government would have realized annual savings of 15 thousand dollars.
So we know from this that the Ministry of Defence was not after the best product for the best price, but about the profits for politically connected companies. The entire scheme, this enormous quantity of meats and the prices paid raise questions about whether all this meat they paid for ever even arrived at the BDF and whether the purchases accurately reflect actual consumption, or was the Ministry paying for meat that never reached, or maybe it reached and ended up in the hands of politically connected persons or even restaurant owners? Tonight, there continues to be more questions than answers.
While chicken was the meat purchased in the greatest volume, the BDF also purchased 200,000 pounds of other meat, bringing the total to about half a million pounds annually. That does not include breakfast meats and canned meats, which were also purchased.
Again, that information is from the 2023-2024 tender document. We requested the tender documents for the most recent year but were told there are national security considerations that prevent their release. We plan to challenge that.
