The contracting board of the Almonte City Council chose a single technical report from those offered by the company Aymed, which lacked scoring. This decision left the technical evaluation without a conclusive result, leading to the commissioning of a new report from ARE Asesores, which ultimately proposed the award to UTE Aqualmonte.
As stated in the minutes of the contracting board, the incorporated report is based on qualitative assessments without numerical translation. This document contrasts with two other reports, accessed by this newspaper, which did include scores and had an almost identical structure, bearing the letterhead of the Almonte City Council.
All three documents shared the same technical and methodological structure, including the index, criteria, sub-criteria, and individualized analysis of the offers. However, the crucial differences lay in the application of scores and their legal consequences. In the two scored reports, FCC Aqualia obtained the best evaluation with 44.5 points, followed by Hidralia with 43.60 points, while UTE Aqualmonte was below both.
One of these scored reports indicated that UTE Aqualmonte did not reach the minimum threshold of 50% of the maximum required score, which would have implied its automatic exclusion from the tender. Despite the existence of these conclusive reports, the contracting board decided not to incorporate them into the file, choosing only the unscored version, attributed to Aymed.
“"The existence of this exchange proves that the two scored versions were available from the beginning of the procedure, along with the version finally incorporated into the minutes, and that the choice of the latter does not respond to the non-existence of technical alternatives, but to the selection of the only option that did not block the award."
The decision to incorporate an inconclusive report forced the contracting board to request a new opinion from ARE Asesores. This consultancy applied a different methodology and did translate the evaluations into points, which finally allowed the award to be proposed to UTE Aqualmonte.
In parallel, three of the four bidding companies have raised formal objections. FCC Aqualia and Orthem have requested the annulment of the file. For its part, Hidralia has expressly requested the exclusion of UTE Aqualmonte for not having the certificate of conformity with the National Security Scheme, which, if successful, would place Hidralia in first place.
This chain of decisions exacerbates the context of nullity already pointed out by the external legal advisor hired by the contracting board itself, who noted irregularities in the incorporation of decisive technical evaluations and in the recourse to external advice for criteria subject to value judgment.
