The company, also a bidder in the tender, has filed three formal complaints with the Almonte City Council Registry, accessed by this newspaper. In these documents, Aqualia alleges a process fraught with anomalies and warns it reserves the right to take legal action if the award proceeds.
The core of the complaints focuses on the minutes of the Contracting Board meeting held on March 26, 2026, and published on April 8. According to Aqualia, this document does not accurately reflect what transpired, omitting and distorting crucial interventions by its representatives. The company asserts that these inaccuracies compromise the legality of the procedure and warrant its immediate suspension.
The Board did not explain or justify in the public act the reasons for commissioning a new technical report, merely communicating the resulting score from that second report and accepting it without further explanation, without offering prior information on the identity of the external advisor or the legal basis for their appointment.
Aqualia also questions the external advisor who prepared the new technical report. The company points out that their appointment was not published on the Contracting Platform, and no information was provided regarding their identity, training, or experience, preventing bidders from exercising their right to challenge. Furthermore, the minutes, according to Aqualia, omit relevant questions and answers, including those concerning the assessment of responsible declarations and the company's challenges to the second report.
The company explicitly requested the suspension of the act before the opening of Envelope 3, warning that continuing the session would cause irreparable harm by making it impossible to reverse the process without contaminating the tender. Despite this, the Board decided to proceed and open the economic offers. Aqualia claims that the minutes do not adequately record these requests for suspension or their justification, nor several requests for inspection and full copies of the file documentation.
Finally, Aqualia insists that the award proposal is almost exclusively determined by the technical evaluation score, even though the difference between the offers in automatically evaluable criteria is minimal. The company argues that the technical report introduces sub-criteria not foreseen in the tender specifications, created after the content of the offers was known, which it considers contrary to the principles of transparency, equal treatment, and adherence to the specifications.
