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The Belgian Court of Auditors questions the fact that the Spanish architect Santiago Calatrava was awarded the construction of a

train station in the Belgian city of Mons,

considering that he benefited from an initial advantage that distorted competition in the competition for which he was awarded the project.

In a report advanced by the Belgian media

Le Soir

and

RTBF

, the court points out

irregularities and lack of transparency in the

public contracts for this project managed by the Belgian national railway company (SNCB), which is

eight years behind schedule

. planned schedule and has

multiplied by ten the initial budget

, up to 332 million euros.

According to the Belgian auditors, to whom the

country's Parliament had requested a report

on the project, the designation of Santiago Calatrava as the winner of the competition for which the construction was put out to tender in 2006 "suffers from gaps regarding transparency and respect for the principle of equality and openness to competition.

This is due to the fact that in 2004, when the project was first proposed, which then consisted only of building a walkway connecting a square with the existing Mons station, the Spanish architect was commissioned to carry out a feasibility study for which he

had access to data that would have given it an advantage two years later over the other

bidders.

The Court of Auditors considers that the winner of the competition "could have benefited from an advantage that could distort competition. In view of the absence of communication to all the candidates of the information exchanged in the framework of this study, which would have made it possible to restore a balance between them,

the participation of this candidate should have been ruled out,"

according to the report quoted by Belgian media.

A deviation from 37 million to 332

The court also sees problems linked to the modifications that the project underwent, which went from being a footbridge budgeted at 37 million euros to the construction of a new multimodal station valued today at 332 million, and which were legally reflected only in clauses of the initial contract,

without opening new tenders.

For the auditors, the modifications made to the initial contract "could have justified the launch of a new public bidding procedure."

The court notes that the clauses added to the initial contract significantly extended the architectural services, that the modifications had a budgetary impact, and that they

introduced conditions that "perhaps could have allowed choosing another offer

if they had been known from the beginning of the contest".

The report also casts doubt on the transparency and control of the budget by stating that the data on it "had gaps", that the changes are "poorly explained" and that

the court has not been able to obtain all the documents

that justify each of the stages of the project, something for which he blames Eurogare, a now defunct subsidiary of the SNCB.

These problems with the documentation "do not allow the Court of Auditors to guarantee that it has been subject to systematic monitoring and control or sufficient transparency," says the document cited by the RTBF.

From the Court of Auditors they indicated to Efe that

the document cited by the Belgian media had not yet been approved by the general assembly,

which today adopted the final report that must be translated and sent to Parliament before being published.

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