Government Awards New Contract To James Caterers Using SAME ‘Illegal’ Procedure As San Vincenz Deal
Prime Minister Robert Abela may have pledged to never repeat the same mistakes made in the scandalous St Vincent De Paul deal, but his government has already granted a fresh deal to James Caterers using the SAME negotiated procedure mechanism criticised by the National Audit Office as “in breach of legal provisions”.
James Caterers was awarded the Meals On Wheels contract to provide and distribute meals to eligible persons living in the community using the “negotiated procedure” instead of a competitive bid. The deal was published on the same day as last week’s NAO report into the St Vincent De Paul deal was made public.
The value of the Meals On Wheels contract is not yet known to Lovin Malta because it is listed as €4.70 on public records, which is the price per meal, not the full extent of the contract. The duration of the contract is also not specified and Senior Citizens Minister Michael Farrugia failed to answer Lovin Malta’s questions about this deal.
Sources who spoke to Lovin Malta said there is an open tender for Meals On Wheels, which already attracted cheaper bids, and yet James Caterers was awarded this contract before the closure of the tender, without taxpayers being given the chance to get a better deal.
Sources said that the negotiated procedure was being abused by the government which was issuing tenders late to then be able to justify the use of negotiated procedure on grounds of urgency because the tendering process takes too long.
In its report published last week into the €247 million deal given to James Caterers and a subsidiary of DB Group, the National Audit Office said that the negotiated procedure should be used “where the services can only be supplied by a particular economic operator… as competition is absent for technical reasons”.
Listed as the “most grave among the concerns identified”, the NAO said the basis cited as justification for resorting to a negotiated procedure was “in breach of legislative provisions”.
The NAO singled out the Department of Contracts which is bound by law to ensure there is no discrimination between economic operators and that “all economic operators are treated equally and transparently”.
“This Office criticises the DoC for, through its endorsement of this negotiated procedure, the Department was in fact discriminating against other economic operators that could have readily bid for and provided the services that Government sought to procure,” the NAO’s report said.
This, the NAO said, this breach of the Public Procurement Regulations would possibly lead to “the invalidity of the procurement undertaken”.
The government is likely to justify the Meals on Wheels deals by citing urgency once again.
But in its report, the NAO said that urgency would only be able to satisfy the Public Procurement Regulations, “where in so far as is strictly necessary, for reasons of extreme urgency brought about by events unforeseeable by the contracting authority, the time limits for the open or restricted procedures or competitive procedures with negotiation cannot be complied with”.
“The circumstances invoked to justify extreme urgency shall not in any event be attributable to the contracting authority,” it added, adding that in the case of the St Vincent De Paul deal, it was “certainly not justified”.
What do you think of this new contract?
READ NEXT: Fined For Not Wearing A Face Mask On The Beach? No Grounds For Appeal, Chris Fearne Says
