Institutional portal - Municipality of Milan

Sentence confirms the assignment to Unareti and the legitimacy of the tender documents. The victory of the Administration after years of work

Milan, September 7 2020 – The Council of State agrees with the Municipality of Milan and confirms the legitimacy of the measures taken by the Administration in the tender for the distribution of natural gas, including the award in favor of Unareti.

In detail, the subject of the ruling is the tender for the concession of the natural gas distribution service, in the territory of the Municipality of Milan and six other neighboring municipalities (ATEM Milan 1), for a period of 12 years and an amount estimated at around one and a half billion euros. A tender of considerable economic value (the second in Italy after the ATEM Rome), but above all of particular complexity from a legal, technical and economic point of view, so much so that it took years for its preparation, announcement and award (only the examination of the offers lasted over a year for a total of forty sessions).

The tender concluded in September 2018, after more than four years of work, with the award to Unareti SpA. The second in the ranking, 2i Rete Gas, appealed to the Lombardy Regional Administrative Court for the annulment of the award, making complaints of legal, technical and economic nature, divided into twenty-two grounds of appeal, many of which are divided into sub-claims, exposed in total in over 150 pages. At the end of 2019, the Lombardy Regional Administrative Court decided on the judgement, accepting some of the legal reasons, without examining the more complex technical and economic ones.

The Municipality and the two competitors presented an appeal to the Council of State, according to which, as stated in an articulated and rich 46-page justification, the Administration operated correctly both in the admission phase of both companies and in the of the technical-economic evaluation of the offers.