The Contentious-Administrative Court Number 5 of Las Palmas de Gran Canaria has upheld the appeal filed by the company Proyectos y Montajes Ingemont against the Tías City Council, which two years ago terminated the contract it had with this company to carry out works in the municipal sports center, considering that there were serious breaches. Now, in a ruling dated February 4, the Court orders Ingemont to return 57,303 euros, corresponding to the bond it had deposited and which was seized when the work was rescued.
However, the City Council specifies that the ruling is not final and has already announced that its legal services are preparing an appeal against this ruling. In addition, it recalls that in its day they adopted this measure with the endorsement of the Canary Islands Advisory Council, which confirmed that there were breaches by the company.
The works, which consisted of the construction of a gymnastics room for martial arts on the ground floor and a terrace and cafeteria on the upper floor, were awarded in 2015 to Ingemont "for its construction deadlines and prices", according to the City Council. However, precisely due to non-compliance with these deadlines, the following year they requested an opinion from the Advisory Council to terminate the contract and recover possession of the property.
"Culpable breach of deadlines"
On September 29, 2016, the Canary Islands Advisory Council issued an opinion in which it warned of a "culpable breach by the contractor of the deadlines agreed for the execution of the work, as well as its subsequent abandonment", although it specified that the file should be "completed with the explicit pronouncement on the seizure of the bond and the compensation at its expense of the damages eventually caused to the municipal Administration".
For its part, the company alleged that it had not abandoned the work but that it had been "paralyzed" due to "the lack of supply of materials for the execution" - which the Advisory Council determined did not exempt it from responsibility - and subsequently requested that the City Council pay it for the part executed until June 1, 2016.
Now, the company itself has made public the content of a ruling that states that it obliges the City Council to pay those 57,303.46 euros, although the City Council is confident that the courts will rule in their favor in the second instance.
