A court decision to strike down a waste-to-energy tender award decision had nothing to do with the way Wasteserv selected the winning bid, the company said on Saturday.

Wasteserv said its adjudication procedure to rank bidders was fully transparent and carried out with the help of waste management consultants COWI A/S and audited by UK-based firth Frith Resource Management. 

The court decision which cancelled the tender decision this week “concentrated solely on what it deemed as perceived conflicts of interest within the Public Contracts Review Board, which heard the losing bidder’s appeal,” Wasteserv noted. 

“At no point did the Court of Appeal question the detailed technical or financial scoring of WasteServ’s adjudication process. The Court, however, annulled the Public Contracts Review Board decision on grounds of perceived conflict of interest,” it said. 

The statement is Wasteserv’s first public reaction to this week’s court decision to annul the award decision.

That court ruling is likely to significantly delay an already-delayed process to build a waste-to-energy incinerator. Malta requires such a plant if it is to reach EU-mandated waste management targets, with the facility having the additional benefit of generating energy to pump into Malta’s strained national grid. 

The lucrative contract was awarded to a consortium made up of French waste management giants Paprec and local contractors Bonnici Bros. One of the bidders that lost out, a consortium involving Hitachi and Zosen, appealed the decision.

When their appeal was dismissed by the Public Contracts Review Board, the applicants took their objections to court.

This week, a court ruled that two members of the PCRB – its chairman Kenneth Swain and member Vincent Micallef - had conflicts of interest that should have precluded them from deciding on the tender appeal. 

Furthermore, the court said that Wasteserv’s tender adjudication committee was irregular because one of its members, Wasteserv manager Stephanie Scicluna Laiviera, was a substitute PCRB member. 

In its statement on Saturday, Wasteserv said Scicluna Laiviera “played absolutely no part in the PCRB appeal hearing” and that she had immediately advised the PCRB she would play no part in any proceedings involving the bid. 

She was not part of the PCRB board that decided on Hitachi’s appeal. 

Wasteserv said it was issuing the statement because “false claims and malicious accusations” were circulating in sections of the media, implying that the court decision concerned its adjudication process. 

“Sections of the media have either misunderstood or are deliberately misconstruing the court decision so they can cast WasteServ in a bad light,” it said. 

“WasteServ condemns such destructive behaviour, which seems solely intended to further stall and destabilise its efforts to deliver a vital infrastructural project in the hope that a losing consortium — with an offer that would have cost taxpayers €200 million more — will get a second chance.”