The capital city of Bulgaria may very well wake up one day flooded with garbage after a contest to select companies for collection and transportation of waste was declared unlawful by the Commission for Protection of Competition (CPC) and the contracts of current cleaners expire in the summer. The only workaround is to sign non-transparent annexes with the old companies. There is no guarantee, however, that all of them will agree to do so and no wonder this can lead to twisting of the hands of local authorities, who will not have a choice.
In practice, against the decision of the Mayor Yordanka Fandakova for the initiation of a procedure were drawn three complaints – from Aldes Ltd., GNT Ltd. and Municipal Vehicles LTD. They were united by the CPC in a mega-case, the decision on which was published a few days ago. The first violation of metropolitan officials as established by anti-monopoly body was that the documentation did not indicate what number of containers for bio-waste candidates must have. It was noted only what volume the containers needed to have.
The local government claims that these objections are unfounded and that the record of data in the tender documentation were adequate for the development of technical and price bid. The next statement of the plaintiffs accepted as reasonable was that there is no way the cleaning of tree branches to be reported per hectare, as this specific activity depends on the height of the trees and their size and is performed with specialized equipment per unit, not per area. According to documentation potential bidders had to bid price per decare, totally unaware if and when (and during what season of the year) they may be contracted by Sofia Municipality to do the job. There was missing information on the number of trees, as well as their thickness and height..
The councilors made a mess also with the set penalties for non-compliance with the planned activities. The problem is that there are two different penalties for the same offense.
Meanwhile CPC refused to rule on perhaps the most controversial moment of the contract – whether its object is identical to that of the one placed earlier in which procedure certain contractors had been chosen and contracts signed. Competition watchdog’s experts were of the opinion that the legislation does not contain a provision that restricts the right of contracting authorities to issue a decision to initiate a public procurement procedure identical (or partially matched) with that of an already signed contract under a completed procurement procedure.
The BANKER
