SCOTLAND'S transport authority is being sued for almost £1 million by a gritting company for failing to follow the correct purchasing procedure for de-icing salt during two of the country's coldest winters on record.
Transport Scotland (TS) is being pursued by National Gritting Services (NGS), a supplier based in Southampton, for not publishing tenders or contract award notices for several salt purchases in 2009-10 and 2010-11 in the Office Journal Of The European Union (OJEU), contrary to the procurement rules.
A move by TS to have the case thrown out under technical grounds was dismissed last week by the Court of Session in Edinburgh.
NGS is claiming that had it known about the salt requirement, it could have undercut TS's suppliers, which would have forced the agency under the same rules to buy from the Southampton company instead. It is seeking £980,000 in damages for missing out on the opportunity. TS's main defence is that it was taking emergency action and did not have time to follow the usual rules. NGS claims that the weather was foreseeable and that TS should have bought the salt in advance.
In the preliminary hearing last week, lawyers for TS claimed that the action breached a rule that stipulates it should have been brought within three months of NGS realising the injury had been suffered. NGS successfully argued that it had not had sufficient information to bring its case any earlier, and Lord Woolman concluded that the claim should be allowed to continue.
He said: "The failure by Transport Scotland to publish a contract award notice in the OJEU is a significant one. It subverted the transparency envisaged by the legislation.
"If that notice had appeared, NGS could have no quarrel about matters. It would then have had the knowledge it required to raise proceedings.
"In my opinion NGS might have had suspicions in 2010 and 2011 that Transport Scotland had obtained supplies of salt. But it had no hard information to that effect ... It was only [within three months of raising the action], in my view, the increasing suspicion on the part of NGS ripened into hard knowledge."
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