The auction for the reconstruction of the Summer Garden revealed the imperfections of federal legislation

Today, the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS) of the Russian Federation will consider complaints from the St. Petersburg companies ZAO PA Vozrozhdenie and LLC NEVISS-Complex against the actions of the Russian Museum, which excluded them from participating in the auction to select the general contractor for the Summer Garden reconstruction project worth 2.3 billion rubles . The dispute between the customer and the contractors of a large-scale project has once again revealed defects in the mechanism for placing government orders in the cultural sphere. With details ANNA PUSHKARSKAYA.

The service announced on Friday on its official website that the FAS will today consider complaints from two applicants for the right to reconstruct the Summer Garden that were removed from the auction. This means that until the FAS makes a decision, the Russian Museum will not be able to conclude a contract with Profil LLC, one of the developers of the project put up for auction worth 2.3 billion rubles, which it has chosen on a non-alternative basis. The auction was announced in January 2009, but was repeatedly postponed, and on May 5, 2009, the Russian Museum completely canceled it, not allowing four of the five companies that applied to participate in it, with the exception of Profile (Kommersant wrote about this May 7). According to the FAS, two outsiders have so far taken the risk of appealing this decision - PA Vozrozhdenie CJSC and NEVISS-Complex LLC.

Both companies consider the claims of the auction commission to be unfounded, violating their rights, and also contrary to the federal law “On placing orders for the supply of goods, performance of work, provision of services for state and municipal needs” (N 94-FZ). Thus, the authors of the complaints note that in the protocol of its decision, the auction commission did not indicate which provisions of the basic law for public procurement, 94-FZ, did not comply with the applications it rejected. And the customer, in the opinion of both applicants, did not have the right to reject the application on grounds not provided for in it (for example, due to a lack of information about the country of origin of the goods proposed for delivery, or about the quality of the proposed work). In addition, according to Vozrozhdenie, the mandatory package of documents provided for by the Russian Museum to be provided by auction participants contradicts the list of required documents established by 94-FZ. And NEVISS-complex claims that, having ordered that the Summer Garden be equipped with pumps and lamps of a certain Western brand, the Russian Museum, contrary to 94-FZ, did not indicate the trademark of equivalent domestic equipment. The company insists that the proposed “data on the chemical composition of natural marble chips, the size of lamps, the degree of impact resistance and the weight of pumping equipment correspond to the same characteristics possessed by imported equipment and materials given in the auction documentation.” Let us note that in the conditions of the financial crisis, the replacement of imported equipment and materials with domestic ones is carried out on the market everywhere.

Other arguments of the offended contractors presented to the FAS look like a kind of “answer to Chamberlain”: the authors of the complaints found a number of defects in the tender documentation itself: in particular, the lack of “amount of information for a detailed description of the work,” as well as the discrepancy between the customer’s technical specifications and his own design and estimate documentation . The authors of the complaints did not ignore the content of the draft government contract that they did not receive, a number of provisions of which, according to their version, contradict the same law 94-FZ.

The FAS decision is expected today. At the same time, the dispute between the customer and the contractors of the project for the reconstruction of a federal monument once again revealed the defects of the current mechanism for placing government orders in Russia. The fact is that the “market law” 94-FZ (the favorite brainchild of the Ministry of Economic Development, developed in 2004 as the main anti-corruption mechanism for disbursing budget funds) is not very suitable for projects implemented in the cultural sphere. On the one hand, the ability to exclude contestants on formal grounds still does not exclude the biased attitude of budget fund managers, while outsiders of one auction often turn out to be the “sole supplier” at other sites. In particular, the NEVISS-Complex, offended by the Russian Museum, recently received without alternative a number of contracts placed by other organizations subordinate to the Ministry of Culture. On the other hand, the ministry itself is so far unsuccessfully trying to lobby for amendments to 94-FZ, which would change the criteria for selecting performers of works for the preservation of cultural heritage and remove orders for the creation of works of art from the scope of the market law.

Entrance to the garden through FAS