Another questionable procedure for a nepotistic distribution of money and attempts to contract with pre-selected companies came out. This time it is a complex cleaning of buildings and associated facilities and areas of Sofia Airport for the next four years on which the state company had envisioned an impressive five million levs. The capital’s airport is large, there is no dispute in that, but it certainly is not so huge that cleaning costs should be more than for all the buildings of the executive power combined. Airport’s hygiene comes to at least 1.25 million levs per year while polishing the buildings of the ministries – takes only a million. What is more, the money would be distributed in complete contradiction to the law.
Procurement of the complex cleaning services of the airport was announced in early November 2012 and yet then raised concerns that the conditions had been written for a specific player to win a contract with extremely inflated prices. High threshold for participation almost predetermined the outcome of the auction. Candidates must prove
at least 15 million levs in turnover
in the last three years. Furthermore, revenue has to come from cleaning services. Such companies on our market, however, are less than the fingers of a hand and together with the other requirements opportunities for competition were actually ruined.
How limiting the conditions are could be shown comparing them with those of the centralized tender for provision of the same services to all ministries and their subordinate agencies, i.e. dozens of large buildings housing thousands of employees. The minimum turnover there was only 400 thousand levs and even that is too high for many of the companies.
It is therefore not surprising that in the race took part only three companies – the Varna-based Vicky Comfort of Lachesar Petrov, the consortium of The Airport Clean (between Scancleen, Teodora Sofia and Skavas Control) and the Italian S.P . D. Ltd. which in the country is represented by Viga Germano. The final ranking of the evaluation committee admitted only the latter two, removing Vicky Comfort out of competition because of missing quality certificates for some products. As expected, Mr. Petrov complained to the Commission for Protection of Competition, which brought to light the whole vicious scheme.
The check of the anti-monopoly authority found that the entities admitted to negotiation, S.P.D. Ltd. and The Airport Clean do not meet the conditions and are ranked in
complete contradiction with the regulations
The Italian company, for example, has not demonstrated that it would really have the necessary equipment to perform this contract.
The consortium Airport Clean after the investigation of the Commission for Protection of Competition was found to have not submitted the required quality certificates and safety data sheets from which it could become clear that the proposed cleaning products are for professional use.
Ultimately, the decision to rank the participants was revoked and the case was returned to the contracting authority for terminating the tender procedure due to the fact that no candidate met the requirements of the contract. And since such a decision was not issued, it can be assumed that the order of the Commission for Protection of Competition was appealed before the Supreme Administrative Court.
In this case, there is one more interesting detail. The cleaning of the capital airport
was even previously associated with dubious schemes.
In May 2007 the company Jizah BG signed a five-year contract for more than 7.2 million levs for maintaining hygiene at the new Terminal 2. It was the only contestant as contenders had been required to show a turnover of at least EUR 30 million for the previous three years. By itself, this implied that a contract was to be concluded because there was no real competition was, but this legal issue was apparently ignored.
The BANKER
