I love a good anti-anecdote (antidote?) ;) Here's one potential problem with the selection criteria: "low bid, low GDP country". I might have been better to weight the bid with the GDP (I don't mean really crunch the numbers, just put your thumb on the scale).

But more to the point, if your friend didn't have a lot of experience with this sort of thing, he probably wasn't that good at picking a bad apple. Or he just got unlucky, maybe.