The company Club Lanzarote has registered a document in the Cabildo in which it requests that the award of the water cycle in Lanzarote be reviewed ex officio, since it maintains that the procedure that was followed is "illegal". Specifically, the company asks that the agreement of the Water Consortium of January 2013 be reviewed and declared null, by which it was agreed to initiate a negotiated procedure with publicity (after the tender initially called was declared void), and the subsequent agreement of April 2013, by which the water supply, sanitation and reuse service was awarded to the company Canal de Isabel II Gestión.
In the letter, the lawyer of Club Lanzarote recalls that the law allows resorting to a negotiated procedure when a tender is declared void, but as long as there are no "substantial modifications" in the conditions. However, in this case, he denounces that "the contract finally awarded has nothing to do with the one initially submitted to tender and declared void".
"It is not that there has been a substantial modification of the contract, it is that we have encountered radically different conditions", maintains Club Lanzarote, which feels affected after the seizure of the desalination plant it managed in Montaña Roja, and which has now passed into the hands of Canal Gestión.
In this regard, Club Lanzarote recalls that on September 18 it already denounced before the Duty Court the seizure of its desalination plant "through the use of force and without any judicial order authorizing it". Now, it goes further and has initiated the procedure to try to annul the contract that left the water of Lanzarote and La Graciosa in the hands of Canal Gestión.
"All the elements were altered"
The Club Lanzarote document insists that there was a "substantial modification of the essential conditions of the contract (fee, price and obligations) and, therefore, the contract is illegal, since all the elements of the economic-financial equation of the same were altered".
In this regard, it points out that the concession time went from 25 to 30 years, that the investments went from 15.7 million euros to 54.4 and that the variable fee A was lowered from 4 percent to 1 percent. In addition, in the tender specifications "the absorption of all personnel and assessment of collective bargaining in the offer was established", but "in the final contract Canal Gestión initially assumed all public personnel, although it later carried out an ERE, despite the fact that one of the reasons for the award was supposedly the maintenance and stability of public employment".
Finally, the defense of Club Lanzarote emphasizes that the payment method of the initial fee was also modified, since the 50 million euros had to be paid prior to the formalization of the contract, but this was modified "radically", agreeing to an initial payment of 15 million, and the rest with annual payments for five years.
"The Consortium's agreements are null and void because they have been issued totally and absolutely disregarding the legally established procedure", insists the lawyer of Club Lanzarote in his letter, in which he cites jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union that would support his theses.
