The Supreme Court yesterday dismissed appeals filed by French company Alstom and Spanish company CAF against Chinese company CNR's win in the Greater Tel Aviv light rail carriages tender. The court ruled that the appellants would each pay NIS 75,000 in court fees. The judgment was written by Justice Uri Shoham, with Justices Salim Joubran and Zvi Zilbertal concurring.
The carriages tender was issued in November 2012. It included the purchase and maintenance of 90 carriages for the light rail red line, with an option for the purchase of 30 additional carriages. Five companies registered for the preliminary selection stage, of which only three were approved. In the next stage, the quality and price of each bid was examined. Quality was assigned a 30% weight, and price 70%. The quality examination process was completed in January 2015, won by CAF with a mark of 92, followed by Alstom with 87.5 and the Chinese company with 80.22. In price, CNR won with NIS 1.27 billion, compared with CAF's NIS 1.36 billion bid and Alstom's NIS 1.45 billion.
CNR was declared the winner in November 2015, and the two losers filled an appeal to the NTA Metropolitan Mass Transit System Ltd. tenders committee two months later. The committee dismissed the appeals in March 2016, following which the two companies immediately filed administrative petitions for cancelation of the tender. Following a detailed discussion of the appellants' arguments and a review of the tenders committee's minutes, Justice Shoham stated in his ruling, "My impression is that that in the points it assigned to the CNR bid, the examination team scrupulously observed the rules established for examining and rating the bids.
"Based on the above explanations, I recommend to my colleagues that the appeals be rejected, including the appeal against the expenses that the court of the first instance imposed on the appellants." Adv. Ayelet Simon-Vekslar represented NTA, and Advocates Yehoshua Horesh, Eran Bezalel, and Uriel Prinz of the S. Horowitz & Co. law firm represented CNR. Bezalel said that the judgment "constitutes a clear policy on complex tenders… The judgment also is very important good news for competition and consumerism, and facilitates the inclusion of Chinese companies in complex infrastructure tenders in Israel."
Published by Globes [online], Israel Business News - www.globes-online.com - on April 20, 2017
© Copyright of Globes Publisher Itonut (1983) Ltd. 2017