A second business consortium plans to lodge an appeal in court over the outcome of the Public Contracts Review Board’s (PCRB) decision on the Evans Building concession.
Iconic Hotel Malta – a consortium made up of European School of English Ltd (which the Bianchi family has invested in) and Arrigo Group of Hotels Limited – had proposed turning the Evans Building into a Nobu hotel.
Nobu, a luxury hospitality brand co-founded by Robert De Niro, has a presence in several countries.
Its bid was disqualified by the evaluation committee over the methodology used by the consortium to calculate its gearing ratio.
The committee went on to grant the concession to Valletta Luxury Projects, a consortium composed of Eden Leisure and Iniala owner Mark Weingard who are planning to develop an Anantara hotel at Evans Building.
In separate appeals, the Nobu consortium challenged its own disqualification, bringing forward expert reports and evidence to show that the bidders fully satisfied the tender’s mandatory financial requirements, contrary to the evaluation panel’s findings.
They also challenged the decision to grant the concession to the Ananatara bidders, arguing that they had listed its annual €1.2 million concession fee as its total bid - which was actually €78 million. The Anantara bidders stressed that this was nothing more than a mathematical error.
The Nobu bidders also called for the disqualification of a third bidder, Katari Hospitality (which involves GAP Group’s Paul Attard), arguing that the committee had extended the tender deadline on multiple occasions, giving Katari enough time to file revised accounts with the Malta Business Registry.
Meanwhile, Katari filed its own appeal against the Anantara winning bid, also zeroing in on the €1.2 million error.
However, while the PCRB disqualified the Anantara bidders, it didn’t reverse Nobu’s disqualification. It dismissed the arguments put forward by Nobu’s technical experts and ruled the appeal itself was inadmissible since it had only been filed by one of the two parties (European School of English) in the consortium.
European School of English’s lawyer Adrian Delia strongly contested this decision, arguing that a consortium doesn’t have standing as a legal entity and that public procurement law allows all ‘interested parties’ to file an appeal.
While the PCRB’s decision would seemingly place Katari as the frontrunner in the pack, the courts are now expected to listen to two separate appeals.
Besides the Nobu appeal, the Anantara bidders – the original winning concessionaires – also plan to mount a legal challenge against their disqualification over a clerical error.
