The specifications of three public contests of Catalan administrations already contained the name of who, even before presenting himself to the call, would end up winning it.
Specifically, these are open tenders for service and supply contracts for the city councils of Santa Susanna and Llinars del Vallès and the Barcelona Esquerra Primary Health Care Consortium. The contracts, which range between 50,000 and 100,000 euros, were made in 2019.
This is demonstrated by an investigation carried out by La Nueva España and El Periódico de España thanks to a computer tool for massive analysis of tenders developed by data scientists Manuel J. García Rodríguez and José Carlos Montes Luna. The aforementioned tool tracks the computer documents in PDF or Word format, which are the ones that the administration usually uses to articulate its contracts and that leave a trace through the so-called metadata. Its traceability allows knowing the name of the teams that have created or modified the documents.
Santa Susanna
That trail left the specifications of a tender from the Santa Susanna City Council, governed by the municipalist party Ais Junts, to cover a position of “advisor in municipal public contracting”. Said document already contained the name of the winner, whose initials correspond to IPR, before the opening of the process was published.
The name of the successful bidder appeared, in fact, as “author” of the technical specifications of the contest that she herself won, as it appears in the portal of Public Procurement of the Government of Catalonia.
The events date back to July 12, 2019, when the aforementioned city council published a tender for a simplified open procedure to offer that advisory service for a period of two years.
The estimated value of the contract amounted to a total of 96,156.79 euros without VAT. The award occurred almost a year later, on June 4, 2020, since the process was appealed by another of the five concurrent.
In the end, IPR was the winner because its offer “was the most advantageous taking into account the value for money and being the one that had obtained the highest score”, according to the aforementioned portal. The IPR offer was 89,388 euros, almost 7,000 euros less than the value estimated by the Consistory.
The truth is that the name of the successful bidder appeared in the metadata of the technical specifications of the tender, with identifier X2019001594 and whose PDF was created on July 12, 2019, the same day that the procedure was published.
Sources from the Santa Susanna City Council in contact with this newspaper have not been able to give an explanation for this fact, since the person responsible for this type of tender is currently low.
Linars del Valles
According to the aforementioned investigation, the City Council of Llinars del Vallès also awarded in 2019 a legal advice and defense contract to a person whose name, JMPG, appeared in the metadata of the specifications of the technical prescriptions.
The contract, with reference 3557/2019 and for a duration of two years, had an estimated value of 74,000.00 euros without VAT.
The resolution of the contest, to which two offers were submitted, was published on October 14, 2019, and JMPG won it by presenting “the best value for money”, as stated in the Public Procurement portal.
In this case, the circumstance is that the announcement of the tender was published on September 26, but the creation of the technical specifications is dated August 6, more than 40 days earlier.
The author of the specifications, according to the metadata of the document, was the aforementioned JPMG Its offer was 62,400 euros without VAT, almost 12,000 euros less than the tender budget.
Sources from the City Council of Llinars, governed by ERC-AM, defend the total “legality” of the tender, since all the specifications are made from the Consistory. A spokeswoman for Contracting explains that JPMG already worked on time with the City Council before winning the award, traveling “one day a week” to the municipal offices.
As he explains, “it is possible” that another worker from the Consistory generated the tender from the profile of the computer he used.
CAPSBE
Finally, the Consorci d’Atenció Primària de Salut de Barcelona Esquerra (CAPSBE), which depends on the Catalan Institute of Health, awarded the contract for the supply of multifunctional equipment for printing and photocopiers and associated maintenance, on September 27, 2019. under lease with option to purchase, to the Ricoh company. The name of the aforementioned company already appeared in the technical specification sheet.
This contest, which was going with a tender budget of 42,715.80 euros without VAT and a duration of five years, was made public on July 15, 2019.
Related news
Three days earlier, according to the metadata, the technical specification sheet had been created, in which the name “ricoh” appeared in the Company section. Only that offer was submitted to the tender, which offered 4,000 euros less than that established by the bidding budget. This newspaper tried unsuccessfully to obtain the version of the Catalan Institute of Health on this contract.
These three contracts are added to another 12 from different municipalities and state-dependent bodies that the investigation of the Prensa Ibérica newspapers have uncovered through metadata. The total amount of the competitions on which the suspicion hangs over exceeds six million euros.