A PORTUGUESE water treatment company and the Ministry of the Environment have been accused by an environmental group and two municipal authorities of showing favouritism over a competitive tendering bid involving a number of private companies to treat toxic waste accumulating at a 12 hectare site near Sines since 1969.
Both the Ministry and Águas de Santo André have been criticised by Quercus and the Câmaras at Sines and Santiago do Cacém of showing preferential treatment to a particular cement consortium.
At the heart of the matter is both organisations’ refusal to seriously consider four other proposals presented in the competitive tendering bid from private companies under circumstances they claim are ‘highly suspicious’.
At stake is the treatment and conversion of 140,000 tonnes of industrial slurry deposited in an open landfill lake at Santo André since 1969 where the toxic slurry is the bi-product of the petrochemical industrial complex at Sines, which is Portugal’s main crude oil refinery.
In a joint press conference held on Friday in Sines, both Quercus and the local authorities contested the decision taken by Águas de Santo André to exclude all other companies involved in the competitive bid.
Legal action
The situation is considered so serious by Quercus that it is studying the legal possibility of taking the case to court.
A spokeman for the Minister of the Environment, Nunes Correia, said that his ministry “had absolutely no interfering hand in the competitive bid to treat the oil bi-product slurry”. Three of the bidding companies were excluded with the argument that “they didn’t have a licence for the residual recycling unit.”
It was also pointed out that the solution accepted by a consortium of Portuguese cement producers Secil and Cimpor would have cost 117 euros a ton whereas another candidate based in Spain, with the same solution, only cost 69 euros a tonne. Two other proposals suggested chemical treatment of the slurry at the deposit site: Indaver Portugal submitted an estimate for 65 euros a tonne while the Mesquita Group quoted 39.75 euros a tonne.
Manuel Coelho said it was “interesting” that the proposals from the cement companies chosen would have cost the Portuguese state an extra six million euros compared to the other proposals.
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