The Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development will reactivate in the coming months the bidding for hydraulic works and other actions that were affected by the incidents detected in the processing of the contracting files and in their publication in the Official Journal of the European Union (DOUE). This was stated by the counselor Ramón Fernández-Pacheco in his appearance before the Parliament of Andalusia, where he reiterated that "all programmed investments are guaranteed and the most that will happen is that they will be delayed a few months."
Fernández-Pacheco specified that, after the analysis carried out "at his own request and at the request of the PP and the PSOE," a calendar of new bids has been designed that starts this October and will extend until March 2027, in order for the affected files that were already in the bidding phase to be resumed in approximately six months.
The counselor emphasized that "no municipality" will be left without the planned hydraulic infrastructures. He stressed that "all those actions in execution and also those that were in bidding will be executed. The commitment of the Andalusian Government to hydraulic infrastructures has been, is, and will continue to be unquestionable."
As he detailed, the incidents affect 97 lots of actions distributed throughout Andalusia, with a total value of 325.5 million euros. This set includes works, technical directions, technical assistance, maintenance operations, project drafting, and supplies that were in bidding or with contracts already formalized.
The head of Agriculture, Fisheries, Water and Rural Development pointed out that the programming of the new bids will be staggered, avoiding concentrating them at a single moment. This formula responds, he indicated, to the requests of the public works sector, with the aim that companies can opt for several actions without being overwhelmed by overlapping deadlines.
Regarding the origin of the problem, the counselor explained that it is all due to a "human error" linked to the change of the software program used to send the bids to the DOUE: "although the files were sent, they did not arrive to be published correctly as the new system was not used. There was no intention to prevent the publication of the bids and it was the Ministry itself that detected the error through an internal review."
Once the failure was located, Fernández-Pacheco indicated that the procedure was activated to correct the situation with all legal guarantees and to minimize its effects. In this sense, he has highlighted the transparency with which the matter has been managed, directly informing the affected mayors and holding meetings with the public works companies to clarify what happened.
In these meetings, the Ministry has also gathered the demands of the sector and has decided to update the amounts of certain tenders whose prices had become "obsolete" due to the increase in raw material costs resulting from the current geopolitical situation.