By: C. R.
The long-promised expansion of the Styrian motorway to six lanes in the Ljubljana area will apparently be delayed much longer than originally planned – mainly due to DARS’s blunder.
The National Review Commission has annulled DARS’s decision to award the contract for the construction of a third traffic lane on the motorway between Domžale and Ljubljana to the companies CGP and Pomgrad. According to the Commission, DARS acted unlawfully by awarding the contract without first correcting an obvious error in the submitted cost estimate.
As announced today by the National Review Commission, in the legal protection procedure regarding the public procurement for works on the motorway sections Domžale–Šentjakob and Šentjakob–Ljubljana (Zadobrova), including the Ljubljana Šentjakob and Ljubljana Sneberje interchanges, which is being carried out by DARS, the Commission upheld the request for a review submitted by the company Mapri Proasfalt.
The Commission found that the selected bidder – CGP and Pomgrad – failed to include a negative sign for the resale price in one of the items in the cost estimate, as was explicitly required by the contracting authority. The absence of the negative sign can be considered an obvious error that the contracting authority may, under the Public Procurement Act, overlook. Due to this apparent error, the cost estimate contained calculation errors that are, according to legal provisions, correctable, explained the Review Commission.
However, because DARS awarded the contract to the selected bidder without first correcting these calculation errors, the Commission concluded that DARS acted in violation of the law.
The National Review Commission therefore upheld the review request and annulled the decision to award the public contract.
Three bids were submitted for the public procurement regarding the expansion of the Styrian motorway approach to Ljubljana. The lowest bid, amounting to €80.79 million excluding VAT (or €98.6 million with VAT), was jointly submitted by CGP and Pomgrad. Mapri Proasfalt submitted a bid worth €84.5 million, and Gorenjska gradbena družba submitted a bid worth €99.86 million excluding VAT.
In its complaint, Mapri Proasfalt pointed out that the value of the selected bidder’s offer dropped by about €2,700 between submission and selection. The company accused DARS of wrongly treating the bidder’s error in the estimate as a calculation mistake.
DARS rejected the review request, claiming that the selected bidder made a calculation error by omitting the negative sign for waste material, which was required by the system, resulting in an incorrect mathematical operation.
DARS cited a provision of the Public Procurement Act stating that, with the bidder’s consent, a calculation error may be corrected provided that the quantity and unit price excluding VAT remain unchanged. It also emphasised that the correction involved an extremely small or negligible portion of the bid’s value.
Andrej Ribič, Chairman of the Management Board of DARS and a prominent member of the Freedom Movement (Svoboda), admitted in a statement to the media in Ljubljana today that a “minor mistake” had been made. He said the public procurement would not be repeated, but that the selected bidder would be asked to correct the error. He stated the calculation error amounts to €270, while the difference to the next lowest bid is €4 million. This, of course, is a distortion of the facts.
