Plans for a long-awaited waste-to-energy incineration plant have hit another brick wall, with one of the bidders once again appealing the decision to award the €600m contract to the Paprec-Bonnici Bros consortium.

The plant is widely believed to be crucial to Malta’s march towards generating green energy and cutting down on landfill waste, with industry insiders saying that its yearly output could potentially generate enough energy to power some 25,000 households for a year.

But this latest appeal casts doubt over the project’s future, raising questions over when the plant will finally be in use.  

A slow-burn project

The appeal is the latest twist in a saga that began in 2017, when the government first announced the plant, earmarking land in Magħtab for the project.

In October 2023, the contract for the project was awarded by tender to a consortium composed of French company Paprec and local contractors Bonnici Bros, whose €600m bid was the cheapest of the three bids received.

But fellow bidders Hitachi, whose bid totalled €781m, took umbrage at the decision and took the matter to the Public Contract Reviews Board (PCRB), a body responsible for deciding on objections to the award of government tenders.

In their complaint, Hitachi argued that the tendering process was tainted and the winning bidder’s price was unrealistically low.

PCRB threw out the complaint, saying that Hitachi had failed to back its claims, prompting the company to take the matter to a court of appeal.

The courts reversed PCRB’s decision, finding that members of the original evaluation panel and the PCRB had a conflict of interest, effectively sending the tender’s evaluation back to the drawing board.

However, a newly composed evaluation board last week reached an identical conclusion to the original board, once again awarding the contract to the Paprec-Bonnici Bros consortium.

But on Thursday, Hitachi (who have since renamed themselves Kanadevia) once again turned to PCRB with a new appeal, arguing that the contract should be struck down.

'The process was prejudiced'

In their appeal, Kanadevia say that a Wasteserv press release in response to the court’s decision, in which Hitachi were referred to as the “losing consortium” prejudiced the process.

Kanadevia, through their lawyers Adrian Delia and Matthew Paris, are also claiming that the new evaluation board failed to adhere to the court of appeal’s decision to scrap the previous evaluation process in full by “sanctioning” an early stage of the procurement process.

And, the company says, international consultants COWI A/S, who were involved in the initial evaluation, should not have also featured in this second evaluation process.

In a statement published late on Thursday, hours after Kanadevia’s appeal, Wasteserv said that “this waste-to-energy facility is essential for Malta to move away from the outdated way of managing waste through landfills, that are costly to operate and harmful to the environment and human health”.