"Urbaser and FCC Distributing Bridge Cake: Will No One Investigate Suspicious Discounts of -25%?" LARA wrote on April 26 that it had just learned that the GHK consortium had been assigned to the FCC and its team (Urbycolan, Garrai, Biergrim, Ecofert Sansoain and Valorización y Tratamiento de Residuos S.A.) to build and manage the infrastructures of the second phase of the incinerator, which will carry out the treatment of the squares that will generate the biomethanization plant for organic waste.

Igor Melchor, one of the referents in investigative journalism, had suggested some serious irregularities in this assignment:

From what has been revealed these days, it is not yet possible to say that anyone has dared to investigate so thoroughly, but the team lost twice in the competition has taken the decision to the internal court of the Provincial Council of Gipuzkoa to clarify contractual matters. It will be necessary to see if it is the first step to go further or if it will be exhausted as it is, as has happened many times before.

Diario Vasco anticipates that the team of Cespa, one of the companies of the Ferrovial group, believes that in the final scores to decide the competition there was a very small margin between their offers and those of the FCC. The claim in this internal court automatically results in the award being paralyzed; the same happened when the winning FCC at the current stage complained that the work had been handed over to the Urbaser team in the first phase – construction and management of the incinerator. On the other hand, once the Provincial Council has confirmed the hive, recourse to the courts would not stop the works.

The fact is that there has been a curious parallelism in the assignments of the two phases. In the first phase, the jury decided who to donate the incinerator to with a very similar technical score, but the substance was in the economic proposal: Urbaser offered to make the operation 25% cheaper than the FCC. Many asked, then, whether such a discounted price is not suspicious, whether it will happen – as the epidemic is corrupt in public administrations – that this difference will eventually be equalized with new unexpected expenses and investments.

Then, in the second phase, the former loser and plaintiff, FCC, did the same: Extend the offer of 23% cheaper. And the GHK politicians admit it, too. Will anyone look into this sauce? You can't think that Cespa or Campezo can get to that. The fact that in Spain the waste market is shared by consensus among the largest companies is an old fact, the courts have already sanctioned with a large fine the cartel composed of Urbaser, ACS, FCC, etc., and when the business is organized in this way, nobody will dare to take out the rags under the table. In any case, play an envy to ask for a slightly larger share in the distribution of the cake on the table.