Courts rule LRT depot tender must be recalculated

The Court of Final Appeal has ruled that the tender for the construction of a depot for the Light Rail Transit system will need to be reassessed, after one of the interested parties appealed the decision to award the project to China Construction Engineering (Macau) Co. in 2016.

An appeal was initially filed by China Road and Bridge Corporation on the basis of what it deemed was an incorrect assessment of the company’s points performance in the bid.

Points were awarded to the seven contenders on the basis of their price (55 percent), experience gained through previous projects (26 percent), plan for the depot project (15 percent), as well as their honesty and integrity (4 percent).

The difference between the winning bid of China Construction Engineering (Macau) and the appellant, China Road and Bridge, was a matter of less than two points.

But China Road and Bridge argued that the government had not fully taken into account the company’s experience with previous projects and filed an appeal.

Ultimately, the company said, the decision of the government did not comply with the criteria defined in the tender, thus it must represent a miscalculation.

Earlier this year, the Court of Second Instance decided to cancel the existing contact and halt the construction work.

At the time of the Court of Second Instance’s ruling, Chief Executive Chui Sai On filed his own appeal arguing that the courts had no authority to intervene in the awarding of a contract, which was a purely administrative matter.

The intervention was rejected by the Court of Final Appeal, which found that the administrative entities behind the tender had no legal basis to compel the courts to respect the government’s decision.

The Court of Final Appeal said that the administration is now bound to re-calculate the final scores and determine which proposal has attained the highest, “which is done by mere arithmetical operations.”

“The administration has no margin of discretion,” it added.

In a statement issued yesterday, the Transportation Infrastructure Office (GIT) said it was still studying the judgment from the Court of Final Appeal.