Albania

[AL] Public Broadcaster signs contract on building digital networks

IRIS 2015-6:1/5

Ilda Londo

Albanian Media Institute

The Albanian public broadcaster Radio Televizioni Shqiptar (RTSH) signed a contract with the German company Rohde & Schwarz on 19 March 2015. The contract was signed by the Minister of State for Innovation and Public Administration, the acting director of the public broadcaster RTSH and the General Director of Rohde & Schwarz. The Ministry of Innovation and Public Administration has been in charge of overseeing the process of negotiations and in general the digital switchover in the country. The contract assigns to the company the task of building two national digital networks that will belong to and are managed by the public broadcaster. The public broadcaster also has the obligation to host local programme operators in one of the two networks, according to the Strategy for Digital Switchover.

The signing of the contract followed a long legal dispute. Rohde & Schwarz was one of the two winners of a tender that started in April 2013. But the tender was annulled by the then-Minister of Innovation and Information and Communication Technology in August 2013. The Ministry then proclaimed two other bidders as the winners of the tender.

Rohde & Schwarz filed a lawsuit after the annulation, challenging both the cancellation and the proclamation of the two winners of the tender. The first level court ruled that the order the Ministry issued, proclaiming two bidders as winners of the tender, was illegal. The court consequently also repealed the order that annulled the tender procedures in August 2013.

The court’s decision was appealed by the Ministry before the Administrative Court of Appeals. In September 2014, the Administrative Court of Appeals ruled that the case was closed, after the Ministry decided to stop pursuing the appeal of the case. Following the court’s decision, Order no.3663, dated 29 September 2014, was published in the Bulletin of Public Procurement no.41, dated 13 October 2014, which proclaimed Rohde & Schwarz as the sole winner of the tender to build the digital networks of public broadcaster RTSH. Apart from the clarification of the dispute on the outcome of the tender in court, the winning company, the representatives of RTSH and the representatives of the Ministry of Innovation held negotiations on the actual terms of the contract for several months before the current contract was signed.