Miscellaneous – Justice | Marseille – Animal pound market: the city raided
Investigations are adapted to the award conditions
New episode in the animal pound saga. According to our information, a series of searches were carried out on the premises of the city of Marseille by the financial brigade of the judicial police as part of an investigation for suspicions of favoritism in the awarding of the public animal pound contract. .
These surveys were carried out by the public procurement department and the “delegation of animals in the city”. These suspicions of favoritism relate to the conditions for awarding this contract in the spring of 2020. Worth nearly 600,000 euros per year, this contract concerns the capture, transport, management of all stray animals, healthy or injured, for impoundment.
Entrusted in 2019 to the SPA Marseille Provence association located on the Montée du Commandant de Robien in the 11th arrondissement, this contract had been canceled by the former municipality of Jean-Claude Gaudin in March 2020, following a report from the Management. Department for the Protection of Populations (DDPP).
To justify this interruption a year before the end, the City had mentioned “breakdowns“, vigorously contested by the SPA.
Candidate for its own succession during the new award of the public animal pound contract in June 2020, the SPA had however lost this delegation to the benefit of the Clara Foundation. These conditions of attribution are today at the heart of an investigation designated to the judicial police.
But this allocation had also been challenged by the SPA, which had appealed to the administrative court. In a public order issued in November 2020, the administrative court had challenged and canceled the award of the contract to the Clara foundation by the former municipality.
Among the criteria used to break this market, the court had ticked on the location of the foundation’s kennel, located in the town of Trets, 60 kilometers from Marseille. “This distance does not make it possible to respect the travel times set in particular at one hour for emergency interventions, nor the condition for setting up the animal pound on one or more sites, in the municipality of Marseille or in a neighboring municipality.“, specified the order.
Despite this, the offer of the Clara corporate foundation had received the maximum score of 4 out of 4 on the criterion relating to “material means dedicated to the market”. A point that the administrative judge had not failed to raise in his order.
Last point raised by the court: if the City of Marseilles still intended to reassign the contract in question, it ordered it to reject, as it stood, the Clara Foundation’s offer.
Following a new call for tenders, the animal pound contract was again awarded to the SPA. The Clara foundation, which is still contesting the decision of the administrative court, seized the Council of State last June.