Marek Kobylański: Rules are rules, but this makes no sense

A PLN 15,000 environmental penalty has helped drive the cost of a Rail Baltica railway project up by PLN 650 million. That is the central absurdity highlighted by Marek Kobylański in Rzeczpospolita.

A court issued a final ruling that the Mirbud and Torpol consortium had to be excluded from the tender because it failed to include the penalty in its bidding documents. Mirbud received the penalty during another public investment project in 2022. The penalty itself would not have barred the consortium from the Rail Baltica tender, because bidders can be excluded as unreliable contractors only for three years after such a sanction.

But the court found that the consortium had concealed the information and therefore misled the contracting authority. Whether the penalty actually proved that the company was unreliable did not matter. As the article puts it, “rules are rules,” echoing a line from the film Kroll.

Kobylański accepts the need to disclose penalties from earlier projects. Such requirements give public authorities confidence that contractors can handle major assignments responsibly, especially when public investments frequently end badly. But he questions whether a PLN 15,000 penalty can genuinely demonstrate unreliability when the winning offer was worth PLN 4.6 billion and the replacement offer will cost PLN 5.2 billion.

The penalty amounts to 0.0003 percent of the contract value, he writes, and seems insignificant in that context. Formal requirements should serve as safeguards, not exist for their own sake. The additional PLN 650 million, he adds, could buy at least several modern trains, even though separate companies manage the railway tracks and the trains. “Rules are rules,” the article concludes.

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Rules are rules.