The dredging works in the port of San Pedro were tinged with suspicion due to their award.
Last week, the president of the San Pedro Port Management Consortium, Eliseo Almada, signed an extraordinary resolution to grant the dredging work from the access channel and the maneuvering area to the Roma Port company, after an unsuccessful board meeting, where the necessary quorum could not be met.
The organization’s external legal advisor, Carlos Casini, explained that it was not possible to hold a session because there were only representatives present, of the five required. In October 2022, the mandates expired and Caproem and Sociedad Rural resigned from their seats on the board of directors.
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According to Casini, “although it is true that the mandates expired, the statute establishes that until the mandates are renewed or the resignations are accepted, The members of the board of directors have the obligation to continue participating so that this situation does not arise” considered Casini.
Casini justified Almada’s decision: “The statute allows the president of the Consortium, extraordinary, an urgent resolution. At the first opportunity it has, it will be submitted to the board of directors.”
In this way, the Roma Port company and the Consortium will begin the administrative process that will allow the dredging to begin in the next few hours. Another questioning refers to the conditions for the bidding, since only one company could apply.
According to the specifications, the dredgers to be used in the works cannot exceed 800 cubic meters of bucket capacity. Thus, two important companies were left out: Compañía Sud Americana de Dragados, from Grupo Jan De Nul and Dragados Argentinos SA (DASA).
Industry sources said that “that tender was made as a tailor-made suit for a single company.”
“It is not a tailored suit. we don’t work like that. During my tenure, we never made tailor-made suits for anyone. This is a transparent public tender so that those interested in doing the work can present themselves,” he said. Elysium almadapresident of the San Pedro Port Management Consortium, in the middle Transport & Cargo.
The official pointed out that “on the recommendation of the pilots, we have to make some modifications to the access channel layout, and the use of large dredgers would cause the collapse of the cliffs in the area. We need smaller capacity dredgers, the most powerful equipment would not work for this job”.
Presentations by Compañía Sud Americana de Dragados and DASA
In a note sent by the Compañía Sud Americana de Dragados to the port Consortium, it was pointed out that the limitation of 800 cubic meters “is completely arbitrary and detrimental to our right to participate in this bidding process, since the same work has been carried out by us on different occasions, in the same jurisdiction that is the object of this process”.
The company had carried out dredging work in that port during 2019, 2020 and 2021. “All of them were completed in a legal time and manner, and all the obligations assumed in the contract were fulfilled”, for this reason it requested that the restriction be modified due to “there are facts which amply demonstrate that the requirement imposed is unfounded.”
For its part, DASA sent a note to Almada also asking that the conditions be reviewed, warning that it is a “lexcessive and arbitrary imitation” that “affects our right to participate in the bidding process whenever the same work was already carried out in 2018 by the DASA I dredger with a 2,700-meter3 hopper capacitya value significantly higher than that established in this document, resulting in it being totally satisfactory for the purposes of its execution and without having caused any damage to natural and/or environmental resources”.
In the letter, DASA made clear the serious harm suffered “since the imposition of said condition deliberately implies our exclusion.”
Like the Compañía Sud Americana de Dragados, DASA also formally requested that the limitation “in order to rectify and repair our violated right” is reviewed.
LM
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