Court temporarily halts award of sewage treatment plant contract

The First Hall of the Civil Court has provisionally upheld a request by Italian company Dondi to stop the Director of Contracts from awarding a contract to build a sewage treatment plant in the south of Malta.

On June 19, the General Contracts Committee had recommended that the contract be awarded to French company Degremont after conducting negotiations which led to a €26 million reduction in the latter's bid, clearly downsizing the scope of the originally-proposed sewage treatment plant.

Dondi is also alleging that the Director of Contracts can only conduct negotiations with bidders when such negotiations do not result in a significant change to the original terms of the tender. In the case of the south Malta sewage contract, the Director of Contracts himself confirmed to Dondi that the original tender conditions had to be significantly altered in order to achieve the multi-million euro reduction.

Costruzioni Dondi, which is alleging grave and serious irregularities in the whole tender procedure conducted by the Director of Contracts, alleged that subcontractor Polidano Brothers Limited, that was part of its team, had been approached by Degremont to change over to them and act as Degremont's subcontractor. That kind of approach is expressly prohibited by the tender documents themselves, Dondi argued.

Dondi claimed that its exclusion from the contract, allegedly because its experience in constructing sewage treatment plants was limited to building plants that are of slightly lesser capacity than the one originally proposed for the south of Malta, was particularly prejudicial in view of the government's decision to build a sewage treatment plant with greatly reduced capacity compared to the one originally planned.

The court ordered the Director of Contracts to reply to Dondi's allegations within 48 hours.

The hearing has been set for Friday.

The warrant application was signed by lawyers Adrian Delia and John Gauci.