Waste management in Orihuela is often a hot topic, and the regular plenary session in June, to be held on Thursday 25th June, will be no exception. The Mayor, Pepe Vegara, is bringing a proposal to the session to initiate an official review to declare null and void the plenary agreement adopted in September 2008, which awarded the contract for the collection, transport, treatment, and disposal of municipal solid waste and street cleaning to the joint venture formed by the companies SUFI, Liasur, and Gobancast.
Although the contract was terminated in 2012 and the service has been provided by the City Council itself since then, there are still pending legal effects, such as the contract settlement and possible economic damages caused to the Council.
Following that decision, the winning bidder filed a claim with the Administrative Court No. 1 of Elche, demanding the amount of 10,931,260 euro, plus the corresponding interest and costs. However, the proceedings were suspended as a result of another case opened in the Provincial Court of Alicante, based in Elche, the Brugal case, which ended up convicting nine of the 33 defendants, including the former PP mayor between 2007 and 2011, Mónica Lorente, for malfeasance in conjunction with fraud, to four months in prison and twenty years of disqualification from holding public office, as well as three of her councillors.
The main issue that motivates this review now, 18 years later, is precisely the criminal sentence handed down last January by the Provincial Court, which declares it proven that the representative of SUFI and other defendants used privileged information relating to the terms and conditions and the processing of the public tender in 2008 to obtain an undue advantage in the bidding, causing serious harm to the City Council and the other bidders, by taking advantage of that information to prepare their bids, which ultimately led to the joint venture – which was later called Orihuela Capital de la Vega Baja – being awarded the concession.
The legal report that will go to the plenary session argues that, based on that ruling, the contract could be null and void and that, therefore, it is not appropriate to recognise the winning bidder any compensation amounts, lost profits, industrial benefit, legitimate expectation, unjust enrichment or any other economic advantage based on a criminally flawed award.
Therefore, having gathered the relevant legal and technical reports, the City Council has deemed it appropriate to initiate an official review process. The proposal also includes a technical report assessing the potential financial losses this may have caused to the municipal coffers. Specifically, it considers the damages incurred by the local administration due to having to directly manage the service, as well as the resources and means that have had to be allocated to its provision.
Consequently, if the ex officio review proposed by the mayor is approved, the payment of the settlement claimed by the joint venture in the administrative litigation proceedings would not be due. On the contrary, the City Council would take the appropriate legal action to claim from Orihuela Capital de la Vega Baja the amount of 23,066,233 euro, which is the total cost quantified in the report, in addition to the estimated reputational damage and after deducting the amounts owed to the concessionaire, without prejudice to any final settlement that may result from the processing of the case file.
Likewise, what is approved in the plenary session will be notified to the interested parties so that within 15 working days they can submit allegations, as well as opening a period of public exposure for a period of 20 days, publishing the start of the procedure in the Official Gazette of the Province and on the electronic headquarters of the City Council.
Meanwhile, the plenary session in May of last year approved a change in the management model through the municipal company Environmental Management Service (SGM), whose manager is Dámaso Aparicio, advisor and former councillor of the PP, although the service has not yet started despite the fact that the forecast was that it would begin in the last quarter of 2025.
The PP and Vox coalition government is considering an investment of almost 20 million euro over the next six years to optimise a service that had not been updated since it was municipalised in 2012, with resources inherited from the contractor based on a 2008 tender, dragging along logistical problems and an old fleet of trucks that has been generating continuous breakdowns and also the weariness of the population.
In March, the City Council awarded five lots of a contract to four companies to renew almost the entire fleet of vehicles throughout this year for 3,493,788 euro, an amount that becomes the most important investment since garbage collection was municipalised.
This contract is part of a series of investments that have been implemented throughout the term and that exceed 6 million euro, including the renewal of waste and recycling containers – for a total of 800,000 euro – which began to take effect last summer, and a tender of 1.8 million euro for the acquisition of more than 2,500 containers – also for the organic fraction.
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