Road and Motorway Directorate unlawfully awarded a public contract for the repair of a bridge in Trutnov
The contracting authority violated the law when it awarded the above mentioned contract in the negotiated procedure without publication without fulfilling statutory conditions for the use of this type of an award procedure. The appeal against the first-instance decision was not lodged.
In November 2011, the contracting authority invited 5 candidates to submit tenders in negotiated procedure without publication, although an estimated value of a public contract was calculated for more than CZK 57 million excluding VAT. The contracting authority argued in defence of its procedure that the bridge was in serious disrepair and the fixing was necessary to be done promptly. However, the contracting authority had known about the poor condition of the bridge since at least 2007, when it commissioned a diagnostic survey of the construction. According to the Office, the contracting entity had sufficient information about the fact that the construction and technical conditions of the bridge will or may in the future continue to deteriorate and as such the statutory condition that the contracting entity could not predict the extreme urgency was not met in this case.
The Act allows the use of the negotiated procedure without publication only for reasons of extreme urgency that a contracting entity has not caused by its own conduct and that could not be even foreseen. The mentioned case does not meet these conditions and the negotiated procedure without publication was therefore chosen unlawfully.
The contracting entity by its procedure substantially affected the selection of the most suitable tender because if the contract had been awarded by a procedure where a contract notice is published and that allows mutual competition of suppliers, it is possible that the contracting entity could receive more suitable tender price from bidders who were not directly invite to the tender.
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