The Spanish company and ETIRA member has notched up another successful challenge of printer consumables tender that favoured the original (OEM) consumables.
The Mayor of Eibar in the Spanish Basque region has upheld an appeal on a tender for printer consumables filed by Bioservice S. COOP (Bioservice), against the tender specifications governing the contracting procedure for the supply of toner.
Bioservice had challenged the tender arguing that the tender called for “original toner” and that was a breach of public administration procedures that requires the technical specifications will not refer to particular manufacture or origin, or to a specific procedure that characterises the products or services offered by a specific employer, or to trademarks, patents or types, or to a certain origin or production, in order to favour or discard certain companies or certain products.
Where it is not possible to make a sufficiently precise and intelligible description of the object of the tender contract the description should be accompanied by the mention “or equivalent”.
The Mayor found in favour of Bioservice that the tender contracts technical specifications for the supply of original toner, without the mention “or equivalent”, violates the provisions of article 126.6 of the Sector Contracts Law and awarded costs to Bioservice and ordered that a new tender contract be issued.
Alejandro Pedro the CEO of Bioservice said via LinkedIn “Without the support of ETIRA(Vincent A. van Dijk and Javier Martinez Zavala) we could not do it. I hope that we could achieve that public tenders include two requirements”:
- Registration as #weee producers
- Regulation (EU) 2019/1020 of the European Parliament and of the Council of 20 June 2019 on market surveillance and compliance of products
In December last year, Bioservice successfully challenged a hospital tender that favoured the OEM issued by the University hospital of Burgos worth approximately €363,554 ($410,000). Bioservice contested that the original tender contract contained discriminatory clauses that “all items purchased will be originals of the manufacturer’s trademark (…). In no case will reloaded material be admitted “and that “Companies wishing to bid must be official HP distributors.”
The Court upheld the special appeal on contracting filed by Bioservice and annulled the unfair terms of the tender for the supply of toners by the University Hospital of Burgos.
[News Team] This story was updated on the 1st June 2022 with the addition of the quote from Alejandro Pedro.
