Guernsey and Condor running a ‘cartel’, says Jersey deputy
Condor Ferries is facing serious accusations about the state of its finances.
A minister in Jersey revealed yesterday that the company had requested tens of millions of pounds to stay afloat over the past 12 months and millions more to continue operating until next spring.
Another senior politician in Jersey used parliamentary privilege to claim that Guernsey and Condor were running a ‘cartel’ and that the company’s true financial health was being concealed from the public.
Condor refused to comment on what had been said in the meeting of Jersey’s States.
But Guernsey’s Economic Development president, Neil Inder, insisted that ‘good progress’ was being made in talks with parent company Brittany Ferries about running Guernsey-only freight and passenger services from April, following the recent breakdown of the joint process to appoint a single operator across both islands.
It was also announced yesterday that Brittany Ferries had rejected Jersey’s request to continue services to the island throughout next summer on a temporary basis.
Jersey’s Economic Development minister Kirsten Morel has now started a new tender process for a Jersey-only service and said that he intends to announce a preferred bidder within the next month.
He said it was ‘such a shame’ that he was denied the chance of fully investigating the financial viability of one of the original bidders, believed to be Condor, after Guernsey allegedly jumped the gun on 30 October and announced Brittany Ferries as its preferred bidder.
That claim stunned Deputy Inder, who released a statement late yesterday criticising ‘an inaccurate narrative being purported about the process’, and dropping the strongest hint yet that the Condor/Brittany bid scored highest against objective criteria in the original tender process.
‘The provider we selected, Brittany Ferries, was selected based on the joint tender that we ran with Jersey in accordance with the published procurement documents,’ said Deputy Inder.
‘There seems to be an inaccurate narrative being purported about the process. We didn’t break away from the process, we followed it throughout and a preferred bidder needed to be selected. We delivered the certainty our island deserves and only did so after giving Jersey two weeks’ notice of our intention, following the closure of the scoring by both islands.’
In Jersey’s States meeting, Deputy Morel was unable to provide a clear explanation when pressed on why he did not appoint DFDS as preferred bidder, saying only that he needed ‘to treat both parties equally’.
