On Monday the judge investigating the Koldo case in Spain’s Supreme Court added another contract to the file: the duplication of the Belate tunnels on the N-121-A in Navarra, awarded on 26 December 2023 for €62.8M. The allegations are for the courts and nothing here anticipates their conclusion. What is already a matter of record, and what makes the contract worth a procurement post-mortem, is that objections to how it was scored were raised at the time by the people scoring it — and written down.
What was bought, and by whom
The contract covers the duplication of the Belate and Almandoz tunnels, awarded by the Public Works and Infrastructure Directorate of the Navarra regional government. The winner was a joint venture — a UTE in Spanish practice — of Acciona Construcción, Excavaciones Fermín Osés and Servinabar. Joint bidding is entirely ordinary in tunnelling, where the works demand a combination of civil engineering capacity, local plant and specialist experience that few single firms hold. Nothing about the structure of the bid is unusual on its face.
The signal inside the evaluation
The part that a procurement reader should slow down on happened in the mesa de contratación, the panel that scores the bids. According to reporting on the case, several members of that panel recorded discrepancies and cast dissenting votes, noting that no sufficient explanation had been given for why certain bidders received higher scores than others. That is not an allegation made later by a losing bidder or a journalist. It is an objection made inside the process, by the people running it, and preserved in the panel’s own minutes.
Why the paper trail matters more than the outcome
Award decisions are supposed to be reasoned: the scoring must be explicable, and a panel member who cannot follow the reasoning is entitled to say so on the record. When that happens, the objection sits in the file for anyone who later goes looking. In this case the Guardia Civil’s Central Operational Unit asked the Supreme Court in November to incorporate the award into the wider investigation, and on Monday the judge did. The interval between the dissent and the judicial file is roughly two years.
What a bidder can actually do with this
The practical lesson is not about corruption, which is rare and which no bidder can plan around. It is about the evaluation record, which exists in every procedure and which almost nobody reads. A losing bidder is generally entitled to the reasons for the award and, depending on the jurisdiction, to the panel’s minutes. If a panel member has formally recorded that the scoring was unexplained, that is the single most useful document a challenge can be built on — and it has a short window in which it can be used, because the standstill period does not wait for anyone.
| Contract | Duplication of the Belate and Almandoz tunnels, N-121-A |
| Buyer | Public Works and Infrastructure Directorate, Government of Navarra |
| Awarded | 26 December 2023 |
| Value | €62,800,000 |
| Winner | UTE Acciona Construcción – Excavaciones Fermín Osés – Servinabar |
| Raised at the time | Dissenting votes recorded on the contracting panel |
| Added to the case | 27 July 2026, by the Supreme Court |
The objection was made inside the process, by the people running it, and preserved in the panel’s own minutes.
WHY IT MATTERS
Most procurement scandals are described, after the fact, as impossible to see coming. This one was visible in the ordinary paperwork of the award: panel members said the scores were not adequately explained, and said it in writing, in 2023. For anyone bidding on public works, the routine habit worth building is requesting the evaluation reasoning on every loss — not because fraud is likely, but because unexplained scoring is common and is the only thing a challenge can grip.
Source: reporting by eldiario.es, Infobae and El Correo Gallego on the Supreme Court proceedings and the UCO report; the award itself does not appear in our own record of Spanish notices, November 2025 to 27 July 2026. No Otnox platform data is used in this explainer.
