The main All India Bar Exam (AIBE) website, http://www.allindiabarexamination.com/ is offline for "maintenance", around two weeks after Bar Council of India (BCI) chairman Manan Kumar Mishra said the bar exam contract with unqualified contractor ITES Horizon Pvt Ltd had expired.

On 1 June Mishra had sent an email to us stating that the tenure of the ITES contract was over:

One thing more , the tenure of contract with M/s Ites Horizon has now expired , if you have accepted the brief of some agency again for the coming tender and you have in your mind that by committing nuisance or making some sorts of baseless comments you will succeed in pressuring , tell your foreign fellow , it's Bar Council Of India not of a foreign country. Here things are done fully in accordance with law. Decisions are taken after thorough consideration .

Somewhat strangely, the domain http://allindiabarexam.co.in/ continues to point to ITES Horizon's homepage.

This year's ninth AIBE results were five weeks late after several extensions after a three-month postponement of the exam itself.

We had reported in November 2015 that the AIBE contract with ITES had been quietly extended after it came to an end in November 2014 without a tender.

ITES won the 2012-2014 bar exam contract under suspicious circumstances: It was the least experienced of five bidders for the contract, with none of the technical expertise and history which it claimed to have and on which the award was allegedly based; It missed the application deadline published in the BCI’s tender and filed an incomplete application; It did not even tender the lowest bid for the bar exam contract.

Full Disclosure: BCI chairman Manan Kumar Mishra has sent a legal notice to Legally India for its story about the BCI’s tender for the contract to run the fifth AIBE Legally India has responded to Mishra’s notice but has received no further response from Mishra.