The State Commission for the Supervision of Public Procurement Procedures has quashed a decision by Zagreb Mayor Tomislav Tomasevic and the city will have to complete a previous tender and sign a preliminary agreement with the Reoma Group or Petar Pripuz's Cezar company, Vecernji List reports on Friday.

Mayor Tomasevic recently cancelled a tender for the recycling of bulky waste, explaining that the city did not need privately owned companies to do it because its Cistoca public sanitation company could do the job.

Two bids had been submitted to the tender, one by the Reoma Group, which offered to recycle the city’s bulky waste for HRK 89 million and one by Cezar, which offered to do it for HRK 125 million.

The public procurement procedure itself was advertised in December 2020 but the previous city government did not make a decision on the matter, explained Tomasevic, who took office after the May 2021 local elections.

Tomasevic in September announced that the city would purchase crushers for bulky waste and that one was already being tested. Meanwhile, he sent some of municipal bulky waste to Sisak to be recycled by the local Royal Media company because of problems with the necessary licences and procurement so currently bulky waste from Zagreb is crushed in Sisak and taken back to Zagreb’s Jakusevec landfill.

Tomasevic now faces one more obstacle – the State Commission for the Supervision of Public Procurement Procedures and the Reoma Group, whose complaint against his decision to cancel the tender has been accepted by the Commission.

The State Commission for the Supervision of Public Procurement Procedures has concluded that there were no grounds for Tomasevic’s decision to cancel the tender because it believes that the city’s explanation that it has only now become aware that it can recycle bulky waste on its own cannot be true.