Narva sports hall tender dispute: winner retains status, committee partly upholds complaint
A procurement disputes committee partially upheld Innopolis Insenerid’s complaint over the sports hall design tender in Narva, but confirmed SIRKEL&MALL’s qualification. The contracting authority must repeat part of its exclusion-basis check before signing the contract.
Estonia’s public procurement disputes committee has partially upheld a complaint by Innopolis Insenerid regarding the tender for designing a sports hall in the EkkeKüla recreation area in Narva. At the same time, the committee found that the decision to qualify the winning bidder, SIRKEL&MALL, was justified.
The tender was organised by Narva Linna Arendus. Innopolis Insenerid challenged the contracting authority’s decision, arguing that the winner did not meet the requirements for experience in similar projects. According to the procurement conditions, bidders had to have experience as the general designer of at least one sports facility with an area of no less than 3,000 square metres. SIRKEL&MALL cited the Tehvandi sports complex in Otepää as such a project.
Innopolis Insenerid claimed that the general designer of the complex was another company, Kauss Arhitektuur, and that SIRKEL&MALL had only performed separate engineering tasks, including heating, ventilation and water supply. SIRKEL&MALL and Narva Linna Arendus, in turn, said that SIRKEL&MALL had actually coordinated the design work, brought together different sections of the project and bore responsibility for the result before the client. The committee agreed with this argument and dismissed that part of the complaint.
However, the committee identified a violation in another part of the procedure. When checking the winner, Narva Linna Arendus had determined that there were no mandatory grounds for excluding it from the tender, but had not carried out a full check of the so-called optional grounds provided for in the Public Procurement Act. As a result, the committee annulled Narva Linna Arendus’s decision of 25 June regarding the review of exclusion grounds. The contracting authority will have to repeat that check in full.
The committee’s decision does not mean that the tender results are cancelled or that SIRKEL&MALL is disqualified. The company retains its status as winner, but before the contract is signed the client must re-check whether any statutory grounds for exclusion exist.
Sergei Gorlach, head of Narva Linna Arendus, told Rus.ERR he was confident that fixing the procedural shortcomings would not delay the project. He stressed that the committee had confirmed the legality of the decision to select SIRKEL&MALL and that the dispute was essentially about bureaucratic wording.
Because the complaint was only partially upheld, the costs were shared between the parties. Narva Linna Arendus must pay Innopolis Insenerid €1,170 (excluding VAT) for legal services and reimburse €384 in state fees. Innopolis Insenerid must compensate Narva Linna Arendus €1,785 in legal costs and SIRKEL&MALL €1,994.58. The committee’s decision can be appealed to the Tallinn Administrative Court within ten days of its publication.
According to the draft contract, the winner will have eight months to develop the full main design for the sports hall in EkkeKüla on a turnkey basis. Payment is planned in three stages: 25% of the contract sum after the preliminary design, a further 65% after the main design is completed and a building permit is obtained, and the remaining 10% only after construction is fully finished and the hall is commissioned. The contractor must also take out professional liability insurance covering the entire contract amount and must fix any errors or shortcomings found in the design documentation at its own expense. The tender conditions stipulated that the cost of design work must not exceed €190,000.
