The TARC upholds the appeal filed by the company that challenged the ORA tender.

The Administrative Tribunal for Contractual Appeals (TARC) has ruled in favor of the company that challenged the contract for the regulated on-street parking service and has ordered the procedure to be rolled back so that the contracting board may require the bidder to justify the abnormality of its offer.

The contracting board of the Calp City Council considered that the appealing company fell under a presumption of abnormality, since the occupancy rates of the blue zone included in its bid were significantly higher than the available data, and it was deemed highly unlikely that the bidder’s forecasts could be achieved. The company’s projected revenues did not economically justify the submitted offer. The annual tender fee proposed by the City Council was €350,000, while the company’s financial offer was €575,000.

When the City Council rejected its bid, the company filed an appeal with the TARC, which in its ruling stated that once the City Council detected the presumed abnormality, it should have required the company to justify the viability of its proposal, allowing sufficient time to do so.

In other words, the TARC did not assess the viability of the offer itself, but found that the company had not been granted the opportunity to justify its bid—a necessary step when the contracting authority suspects that a bid may be unfeasible due to being abnormally low or, in this case, abnormally high. For this reason, the TARC upheld the appeal and required the City Council to ask the company to justify its bid.

As a result, the tendering process is rolled back, and compliance with administrative deadlines will prevent the blue zone from starting operation this summer. The local government received the appeal ruling with disappointment and has already urged the contracting board to resume the procedures to relaunch the tender as soon as possible.