The email that Leandro A. sent to an employee on December 15, 2009 is surprising for its clarity: no slang and no attempt to hide what he wants done.

Spain’s consultancy racket: How firms won tenders with fake proposals

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2021-05-21 15:00:07

The email that Leandro A. sent to an employee on December 15, 2009 is surprising for its clarity: no slang and no attempt to hide what he wants done. Leandro, a director from the consultancy firm 97S&F, is asking for help to win a contract with the City Hall in Bilbao, northern Spain. “We need to do three different proposals so that they give it to us,” he writes. “We have to do our one nicely and well… And another two to cover us. We’ll use [consultancy firm] Deloitte and another company. First do the hours document in a proposal format. Then you have to come up with two losing proposals, I think I’m being clear.”

Leandro couldn’t have been clearer. The employee, who complies with the instructions with similar diligence, later writes to a colleague from Regio, another consultancy firm. “We will send the proposals with the minimal content to protect the corporate reputation, because for the negotiated contracts we have to present proposals that are a bit of a joke.”

These and thousands of other emails form part of an investigation by Spain’s National Commission of Markets and Competition (CNMC) watchdog, which has discovered that for at least a decade, a group of consultancy firms has been working like a cartel to share out the allocation of public contracts, leaving other competitors in the cold.