The Ministry filed a complaint to the ÚOHS, contradicts the alleged doubts in the toll tender

The Ministry filed a complaint to the ÚOHS, contradicts the alleged doubts in the toll tender
23/5/2018Press releases

The use of flash drives for extensive documentation of the current toll system is legal, the antitrust authority has not addressed the nature of changes to the anonymized version of data carriers, while the Ministry had sufficiently explained to the bidders the expected range of toll charge for motorways and 1st class roads to bid. These are the basic arguments of the 70-page analyse, which the ministry submitted to the chairman of the Office for the Protection of Competition to reassess the first-instance decision to non-legitimately cancel the toll tender.

The Ministry filed a complaint to the ÚOHS, contradicts the alleged doubts in the toll tender
"The law does not prohibit the use of flash drives for large documentation of 95,000 documents. In a similar competition in Germany, a rewritable medium is used and no one is contradicting. The antitrust office says there are differences on data carriers with anonymized documents compared to flash drives with non-anonymized data. However, there should not be a comparison of only these two data carriers, which will logically differ, but separately a group of anonymized flash drives and, separately the second group of non-anonymized ones. It has to be added that Kapsch wanted us to black the data in the documentation, and then affronted the difference of the disks,” said Minister of Transport Dan Ťok.
 
The ÚOHS did not address the nature and character of the changes due to anonymization, according to the Ministry, the Office would find that it was not a substantive change, but the lack of a type of deletion of the title of the document which could not affect the tenders submitted. The Office merely stated briefly that the mere fact that the disks were not identical was capable of influencing the selection of the most appropriate tender, which the ministry considers to be a totally wrong legal conclusion.
 
"The Antimonopoly Office did not allow us to comment on comparing the data carriers at all, because they did not provide the results in the background papers for the decision. We could not even ask questions to hired expert. We also see procedural failure in the fact that the supervising authority itself has not been able to track for three months where the discs are and who has access to them. Therewithal they do not want to return the data carriers, which we have already contradicted in court, "adds Ťok.
 
At the same time, the ÚOHS, according to the ministry, mistakenly states in its decision that the contracting submitter has not set a range of charges from 2020 and also mistakenly states that it merely "expects" the extension of the toll by 900-kilometre on Class I roads.
 
"The extension of tolls on Class I roads is firmly provided in the tender dossier; on the contrary, objectively, as in the previous tolling tender in 2006, the number of all newly built motorways on which the toll will be collected cannot be accurately determined per kilometre. Therefore, it is a predicted estimate of the toll charged sections. However, we have already solved this with tenderers in their questions about the tender dossier. But this fact the antitrust authority did not take into account when deciding, "says the minister of transport.
 
At the same time, the Ministry objected to the bias of the chairman of the supervisory authority for his misleading and truth-inaccurate media statement, commenting on the ineffective first-instance decision of the Office; the Ministry does so for the purpose of possible review by the administrative courts.
 
The Ministry of Transport is already preparing for the Government an analysis of other alternative solutions which will ensure the continuation of toll collection after 2019 in the event of a definitive cancellation of the tender. The aim is to ensure the collection of tolls, which annually adds 10 billion crowns, at a lower cost than they have been so far.



 
Back to article list