The Administrative Court for Contract Appeals has ruled in favour of the company that challenged the contract for regulated parking on public roads and has agreed to refer the case back to the contracting authority so that it may request the tenderer to justify the irregularity of its bid.
The Calpe City Council's contracting committee considered that the appellant company was guilty of presumption of abnormality, as the occupancy rates for the blue zone included in its bid were much higher than the available occupancy data and considered it very difficult to achieve the bidder's forecasts. The company's revenue forecast did not economically justify the bid submitted. The annual tender fee proposed by the City Council was €350,000 and the company's financial bid was €575,000.
When the City Council rejected its bid, the company lodged an appeal with the TARC, which in its ruling considered that when the City Council detected the alleged abnormality, it should have required the company to justify the viability of its proposal within a sufficient period of time for justification.
In other words, the TARC does not analyse the viability of the bid, but considers that the company was not given the opportunity to justify its bid, which is a necessary step when the contracting authority considers that a bid is presumed to be unviable because it is abnormally low or, in this case, abnormally high. The TARC therefore upheld the appeal and obliged the City Council to request the company to justify its bid.
The tendering procedure goes back to square one and compliance with the administrative deadlines will prevent the blue zone from starting this summer. The government team has received the appeal with disappointment and has already urged the contracting committee to continue with the procedures so that the tender can be put out as soon as possible.