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Has EU directive been broken over ship brokerage?
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"It makes my blood boil with fury." Richard de la Rosa tells the latest issue of Fairplay, the shipping magazine.
The Marine Service Shipping broker is upset over what he perceives as tibe unlawful exclusion of companies such as his from tendering for ships that have been arrested. "The former and current Admiralty Marshalls have refused to discuss it," he says. He and his company have complained to government frequently but. from the correspondence that Fairplay has seen, they appear to have been ignored. "Why won't the government talk about it?" de la Rosa demands.
EU directive 92/50 requires all services rendered to a public authority to be put out to tender, subject to a threshold limit of ?211,000. Given that Gibraltar processed the entire Renaissance cruise and Abu Dhabi Container line fleets -that threshold has been well and truly smashed.
But the tender process doesn't seem to have happened. Back in 1992, then Marshall Katherine Dawson was instructed by the then Chief Minister to put the broker service out to tender. The broker used at the time was Kellocs, but by 1998 another broker, JE Hyde of London, was being used.
INVESTIGATION
The EU regulation on tendering had been implemented into Gibraltar law and was in force by January 1996.
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