French Ecotax truck toll appeal successful

It appears that France's distance based truck toll system is going to roll, once more.

Italian toll road operator, Atlantia, has produced a press release announcing that the French Council of State (appeal court) has overturned the decision by the lower court that had annulled the tender for the proposed "Ecotax" distance based toll for trucks to apply to government owned untolled motorways.

I previously reported on the suspension of the tender, the conflict of interest issue raised in the case and the decision to appeal the original court decision.

The Ecotax is intended to apply to all trucks over 3.5 tonnes in weight, on 12,000 km of highways and 2,000 of secondary roads, and would mean around 600,000 French trucks and 200,000 foreign trucks expected to have accounts.  The system was meant to be operational from 2013, but obviously now faces a delay of around 6 months.  Estimated revenue was around 1.2 billion Euro per annum, with charges based on distance at rates of between 8-14 Euro cents per km (US$0.11-US$0.20).

As a result, the Autostrade led consortium is the winning tenderer, as had been originally the case and confirmed the tender process was valid after previous claims of a conflict of interest between advisors RAPP Trans who were working for the government, but who had also undertaken work for Autostrade.  The contract is expected to be for 13 years and Autostrade will now be negotiating the final terms before signing the contract.

No doubt the French Government will be relieved.  The Ecotax is a new charge, so will be new revenue and the sooner it is operational the better for the government.

Of note is that the Ecotax will be a distance charge, with distances measured using GPS technology.  This will make it the third system based on GPS to charge for distance (after Germany and Slovakia), and the fifth system using GPS either to supplement another form of distance measurement (Switzerland) or as a voluntary option (New Zealand).   The objective of the French government is, in part, to rebalance demand between tolled and untolled highways, as there has been an issue of trucks choosing not to use the private and state owned toll roads in favour of the untolled parallel routes.

UPDATE:  More details on France's Ecotax here.

French court decision identifies RAPP Trans on Ecomouv conflict of interest

Further to the story from yesterday, French website Transport Logistique reports that the Swiss based consultancy firm RAPP Trans is the firm implicated in presenting a potential conflict of interest with the French heavy vehicle tolls project.

The report (in French) indicates the consortium ALVIA (comprising Sanef, Siemens and Atos) alleges "that the competitive dialogue did not obey "the principle of transparency and the principle of inviolability of applications".

The problem allegedly being that the French government relied on RAPP Trans to provide it with professional services.  RAPP Trans is a technical consultancy, best known for having designed the Swiss LSVA heavy vehicle distance based charging system that has been in place since 2001.  It has also undertaken other technical advice work in a number of European countries. 

RAPP Trans also allegedly has "close trade links" with Autostrade, the lead company in the winning bid for the French system, through work with the European Commission.

The fundamental legal question in the appeal will likely be whether those links are sufficient to overturn the tender. 

The appeal will be most interesting.  If the appeal does not succeed, it will raise questions about how transparent RAPP Trans was with the French government about its relationship with potential suppliers, it will possibly create a far higher standard of due diligence of separation of roles between advisors (if RAPP Trans had done work for Autostrade during the time of its work for the French government, it would appear to be a clear cut case of conflict, but if the relationship was beforehand it would seem less clear).   It could simply mean consultants have to choose more distinctly whether they want to advise governments or advise suppliers.  It is a decision that gets undertaken quite frequently - and it does not look good if any company is caught out appearing to be able to give unfair advantage to tenderers.