Fraud of law. This is what the spokesperson for the Popular Group, Cuca Gamarra, puts forward in an appeal for reconsideration filed before the Congress table, in which she requests the annulment of the 12 contracts approved by the president of Congress for the contracting of the translation service to the co-official languages ??other than Spanish and that could be ready in the plenary session in which the modification of the Congress regulations was approved so that those languages ??could be used.
Legal fraud because the objective of the 12 contracts is the same, and each of them is set for a value just one cent lower than the maximum allowed so that the contracts can be made directly, without competition, etc. Each of the 12 contracts are made for a value of 14,999.99 euros.
Because they are less than the amount of 15,000 euros, the 12 contracts are classified as minor service contracts, which in the opinion of the PP are “null and void, as they manifestly violate the regulations on public procurement.”
The appeal indicates that the Public Sector Contracts Law establishes as minor contracts those that have a value of less than 15,000 euros and states, in its article 99.2, that “a contract may not be divided in order to reduce the amount thereof and avoid the advertising requirements or those related to the corresponding award procedure.”
The Popular Group argues that the Independent Office for Regulation and Supervision of Procurement determined that “if the object of the contract is unique and is divided into various files, there will be undue division,” and the State Public Procurement Advisory Board established that for a contract is classified as minor, it must not be modified fraudulently and the contractor must not have signed more minor contracts that exceed the established threshold.
For the PP, in this case, “the functional unity of all of them is evident”, given that the interpretation service awarded “is the same and all contain identical execution conditions”; That is to say, they correspond to the same technical and economic purpose, so they should have been processed in a single procedure that could have, where appropriate, been divided into lots, “but minor contracting has been used, in fraud of law.”
According to the appeal, the 12 signed contracts, each of them
for a value of 14,999.99 euros, were processed as a minor contract in order to be able to carry them out “avoiding any competitive award procedure and thereby violating the principles of competition, publicity and transparency that should govern public procurement.”
In the opinion of the Popular Group, “the general interests are seriously harmed because it prevents finding a form of service provision that is as economically beneficial as possible for the public treasury, and it prevents other companies or interpreters from being able to access these services.” services, eliminating free competition and carrying out a selection of the successful bidders regardless of any criteria of objectivity and transparency”.
The Popular Group of Congress defends that the contracting body could have chosen different award procedures among those provided for by the Law to provide the translation services that were necessary, and gives as an example “the contractual mechanism followed by the Senate” for the contracting interpretation services.
Regarding the justification of carrying out minor contracts due to the need to have interpretation services available prior to September 19, 2023, the day on which the first Plenary Session of Congress was held, the PP considers that it is totally illegal and arbitrary. , because the processing and adjudication of these files did not have the corresponding regulatory protection, since the approval of the reform of the Regulations that protects the use of co-official languages ??in Congress did not occur until September 21.
For this reason, the PP requests the annulment of the award, declaring the nullity of the signed contracts, as well as the suspension of the execution of the appealed contracts until the resolution of the appeal, which if the Board cannot resolve, because it does not enter into its powers, because it exceeds the amount of 100,000 euros, the appeal is considered to have been submitted to the Contractual Appeals Court of the Cortes Generales.
