Ireland brought to court over contract

The European Commission has announced it is to take Ireland to the European Court of Justice (ECJ) over the awarding of a €1.9 million contract for interpretation and translation services last year.

The case concerns possible irregularities in the awarding of the contract by the Department of Justice to the US firm Lionbridge Language Services for providing interpretation services to the Office of the Refugee Applications Commissioner, the Refugee Appeals Tribunal, and the Reception and Integration Agency.

The commission began an investigation into the awarding of the contract after it received a complaint from a rival company.

In a statement, the commission said that by attributing weightings to the award criteria following the closing date for submissions and by modifying them subsequent to an initial review of the submitted bids, "the contracting authority changed the emphasis among the award criteria that were originally advertised and gave them a relative importance that was materially different from what a tenderer could understand from the contract documents."

The commission said that as a result of this it believed that the award procedure did not conform with community law on public procurement and that Ireland had failed to fulfil its obligations under the principles of equal treatment and transparency as called for by the ECJ.