Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 22 March 2018
Public Accounts Committee
2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 4 - Overview of Public Private Partnerships
9:00 am
Mr. Seamus McCarthy:
I will comment in relation to that. Because PPP projects are so big and they take so long to develop, underbidders tend to spend a lot of money to stay in the game for a period and they hate to lose and are likely to be quite litigious and try to recover some of their costs. When we first looked at PPPs, there was a practice in places to pay some of the underbidder costs but a view was taken here, I think, probably rightly, that that was not a course that would be followed here. The practice was where one would indemnify the bidders against high costs. There is a kind of a trade-off in the matter.