The Paris administrative court on Wednesday rejected Suez’s appeal, which contested the conditions under which the call for tenders procedure was relaunched around the large Ile-de-France water market. we learned from the court.
(AFP / LUDOVIC MARIN)
The judge “rejects the appeal filed by Suez Eau France”, indicated the court in a press release, considering that the decision of the Ile-de-France Water Union (Sedif) to resume the tender procedure without excluding the Veolia candidate “is not tainted by an error of assessment”.
This call for tenders for the award of a contract worth 4.3 billion euros over twelve years was disrupted in the spring by a computer bug, which caused confidential documents from competitor Suez to land at Veolia.
The administrative judge also validated on Wednesday the decision of the Sedif to continue the investigation on the basis of the offers as received before the incident, which Suez contested.
The call for tenders was frozen several months after the occurrence on April 4 and 5 of an incident on the Sedif IT platform. Confidential documents intended for Suez ended up at Veolia, which has held this lucrative market for a century.
After six months of uncertainty, the Sedif ultimately decided in October to continue examining the call for tenders on the basis of the offers received before the incident, invoking a decision of the Council of State from 2017 and a precedent linked to the public transport market in the Lille metropolis.
The court “heard the arguments of Sedif and confirmed the decision taken by its president”, André Santini, reacted the water union on Wednesday, rejoicing that justice recognized that he “did not disregard the rules of the order public and authorizes, in doing so, the continuation of the call for tenders procedure.