No Spanish CAF trains for NMBS/SNCB after all?

The Belgian Council of State has suspended the public railroad company NMBS/SNCB’s decision to designate Spanish CAF as the preferred bidder for purchasing new trainsets. The decision came after co-bidder Alstom went to court to ask for it to be suspended.

The Council judges that NMBS/SNCB has not been sufficiently transparent in its decision. As a result, the railroad company may not start negotiations with CAF at this time.

Criticism of CAF

In late 2022, NMBS/SNCB launched a tender to deliver 180 new MR30 railcars. The railroad company received three bids for the billion-dollar contract: one from Spain’s Construcciones y Auxiliar de Ferrocarriles (CAF), Germany’s Siemens, and Alstom. After analysis based on various criteria, including technical quality, CAF emerged as the preferred bidder.

But that choice fell badly with the French company Alstom, which, unlike CAF, does have factories in Belgium—it employs 3,000 people at its Bruges and Charleroi sites. Bernard Belvaux, the CEO of the company’s Benelux branch, even called the decision “shocking.”

Belvaux also said that Alstom’s proposal was more than 100 million euros cheaper than CAF’s, while the overall score would have been only very slightly in favor of the Spanish.

The choice for CAF also met with great political resistance, partly because there are indications that the company is building rail lines in the occupied Palestinian territory, more specifically, the Jerusalem Light Rail (JLR) expansion.

This expansion includes extending the existing Red Line and constructing a new Green Line, both of which connect illegal Israeli settlements in occupied East Jerusalem to West Jerusalem.

Mobility Minister Jean-Luc Crucke (Les Engagés), however, pointed out that the decision was unanimously taken at the end of February by the NMBS/SNCB board of directors, which included representatives of N-VA, CD&V, Vooruit, and MR, as well as opposition parties Open VLD, Groen, PS, and Ecolo.

NMBS/SNCB awaits other judgment

But the Council of State is now whistling the NMBS/SNCB back. According to the court, the NMBS/SNCB decision does not show which method was used to assess the technical quality of the various bids. The company thus “ignores the principle of transparency” that a public company must observe when awarding public contracts.

In reaction, NMBS/SNCB says that the tender procedure does not seem to have to be repeated and that it is a judgment of the French-speaking chamber of the Council of State. There is still an appeal pending before the Dutch-speaking chamber, and so NMBS/SCNB does not want to make a definitive statement yet.

The railroad company still emphasizes that the timely order of the railcars “is of great importance for the renewal of the rolling stock fleet and to meet the growth in passenger numbers, as foreseen in the public service contract concluded with the Belgian state.”

NMBS/SNCB would like to sign the 3,4 billion contract by May 1. The first deliveries, accounting for 54,000 of the 170,000 seats, would then occur by the end of 2029.