Tunstall appeals Swedish procurement exclusion. Tunstall has gone to a Swedish administrative court to fight the exclusion by Adda Inköpscentral from the Swedish framework agreements for the municipal procurement of telehealth and security alarms, In April, Adda, the strategic supply consultant and agreement manager, announced that Tunstall would be excluded from two 2018-2019 framework procurement agreements as well as the new four-year framework agreement on performance issues, including a major problem with alarm responses last October [TTA 22 May].
What is being debated in court in the action between Tunstall and Adda is the following, according to SVT Nyheter (disclosure: translated from Swedish to English via Google Translate):
- Certain municipalities received compensation from Tunstall, which the company has refused to disclose nor what the agreements look like, other than they were based on a template. Municipalities also refused to send Adda copies of the agreements, citing confidentiality. In Sweden, municipalities can negotiate agreements on their own with suppliers, but if they choose to work under the framework agreement, the municipalities create their own detailed contracts using the framework as a basis. Adda apparently received copies of agreements that included ‘silence’ (presumably non-disclosure or confidentiality) clauses. According to Adda, this violates both the framework agreement and ‘publicity legislation’.
- According to SVT quoting Adda’s filing, “Tunstall “consistently deliberately withheld information from Adda, probably in order to avoid exclusion in the Procurement” and now “deliberately tries to mislead not only Adda, but also the administrative court.” This also refers to data files that contained information about when alarms stopped working in over 100 municipalities in October 2020 due to, apparently, a bad software update. The translation in the article subhead refers to “lying and misleading the court”.
- Municipalities had delays in implementation going back to 2018. Ystad demanded a fine of half a million for its delays, where it turne out that response times had been calculated in different ways, After Tunstall promised improvement, Ystad dropped the demand. Götene signed an agreement on security alarms for nursing homes in spring 2020 but only a limited number were operative by December well into this year. This municipality remains unhappy according to SVT, contradicting Tunstall’s official statement to the publication, which closes the SVT main article.
There is no indication in the article when a decision will be made by the administrative court.
There is a second SVT article on the disagreement on the handling of an alarm call in Lidingö. The Tunstall call center did not call for an ambulance, the city was delayed for two hours, and the person died. Neither Tunstall nor Adda were interviewed for the 24 June SVT articles. Hat tip to two of our Readers who wish to remain anonymous. One also referred, with a certain gimlety turn, to two 2018 interviews with CEO Gordon Sutherland on the subject of building trust both as an organization and with their customers. PwC (January 2018) and The Trusted Executive (June 2018).
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