The GSD has today questioned the Government’s decision to award a five-year, £3.99million contract for the maintenance of the Kingsway Tunnel to Calpe Electrical Ltd, the same company responsible for the widespread power outage in April 2025 during preparatory works for the BESS battery installation at the North Mole. 

A statement continued: “Serious questions arise as to how the Government award contracts and supervises them. It is clear from the last two Principal Auditor reports that general concerns on the supervision of public service contracts arise from Government’s mishandling of such matters and this can have serious financial impact for the taxpayer. 

“People are entitled to expect that the Government will ensure proper supervision and will also have a robust system in place when awarding multi-million pound contracts. In this particular case, people will want reassurance as to why barely a couple of weeks after the Minister responsible, Gemma Arias-Vasquez, asked Parliament to vote on emergency legislation to penalise contractors who had caused power outages, the Government has awarded a £4m contract to one such company. 

“In the name of transparency and public reassurance, Minister Arias-Vasquez ought to now confirm what criteria has been used, whether the previous incident has been taken into account by the Government and what technical assurances it has received. 

“In September 2024, the GSD’s Craig Sacarello filed questions in Parliament asking the Government to confirm the company’s experience in electrical infrastructure projects of the scale and complexity of the BESS system. When the answers were finally provided in October 2024, Minister Arias Vazquez stated, “I am unable to answer that question.” When pressed further on how many electrical or mechanical engineers the company employed, the Minister again could not provide an answer. 

“The Opposition is surprised that a multimillion-pound contract for critical infrastructure has been awarded to a contractor about whom the Government itself could not provide basic information. How does the Government now justify this award given their inability to provide information to the Opposition?”

Craig Sacarello commented: “Gibraltar deserves full transparency and confidence from Government on these important questions that go to the root of how it awards and supervises public contracts. The last thing that should happen is that the taxpayer should end up paying more money because Ministers are not ensuring that there is proper supervision.”