Comment by drra
3 years ago
So these trains are exclusively used in Poland by quite a big number of regional train companies. There are 5 servicing levels starting from P1 up to most complex P5. It used to be that only these major companies would do P3+ but since a few years tenders were won by several smaller competitors at much lower prices all thanks to European Union Agency For Railways that opened that market.
It started with 4 trains that were serviced by SPS Mieczkowski and just wouldn't start. The company was forced to pay €0.5m in penalties and trains were sent back to Newag. At the same time several other trains from different companies that didn't even got to service but spent a bit too much time in one place became immobilized. This all led to SPS Mieczkowski hiring Dragon Sector to investigate and they found several separate routines to disable trains.
This case is investigated by Central Anti-Corruption Bureau in Poland but I doubt it'll do much harm to Newag. The Office of Rail Transport of Poland that would spam rail company with complaints and orders for a small mistake in train schedule washed it's hands from intervening in this case and train purchases have highly regulated tender process and very little wiggle room for rail companies.
>This case is investigated by Central Anti-Corruption Bureau in Poland but I doubt it'll do much harm to Newag. The Office of Rail Transport of Poland that would spam rail company with complaints and orders for a small mistake in train schedule washed it's hands from intervening in this case and train purchases have highly regulated tender process and very little wiggle room for rail companies.
It's clearly a crime of sabotage under Art. 254a kk. Tender process does not matter in this case. We just need a competent prosecutor.
https://sip.lex.pl/akty-prawne/dzu-dziennik-ustaw/kodeks-kar...
Being a 40+ year old Pole I am yet to see a single case of corruption in public sector be prosecuted.
Maciej Zalewski (a co-creator of Kaczyński's first party - Porozumienie Centrum) remains the only high-level politician I know of in Poland that was sentenced for corruption and actually went to jail.
https://pl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maciej_Zalewski_(filolog)
He warned Bagsik and co. (who stole millions of public money through the famous Art-B company and escaped to Israel) that the police wants to imprison them - so they managed to escape. Bagsik later confirmed that they shared some of that money with Porozumienie Centrum's business named Telegraf. Somehow only the less important guy (Zalewski) went to jail, but Kaczyński brothers weren't prosecuted.
But there's a lot of low level corruption that is exposed, it's just usually ignored by country-wide media, because that corruption is local. For one example: https://samorzad.pap.pl/kategoria/prawo/prawomocny-wyrok-byl...
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I haven't seen any evidence of corruption here - just pure malice and monopolistic behavior.
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Having read only that kk article, I'm not certain if trains are considered parts of the infrastructure?
It works for train vandalism - why wouldn't it work on industrial scale?
For example, someone stole active train parts: https://orzeczenia.gdansk-poludnie.sr.gov.pl/content/$N/1510...
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It is also investigated by the Agency of Internal Security and I really doubt they don't have huge problems out of this. This is taken extremely seriously internally.
There's a ton of evidence to prove what happened and they have no chance to somehow wiggle out of this. They're trying... by saying they were hacked. Yeah, the hackers somehow flashed firmware of trains services by competition, to brick the trains. GPS coordinates of competition rail segments were literally hardcoded.
Their newer variant, Impuls 2, is actually used outside of Poland too - Italian FSE operates 11 of them.
Though considering they were hoping to continue their expansion into Italy I imagine they might not have sabotaged these trains (but who knows, maybe they're fine with burning even new customers).
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Hypotheticals be hypotheticals, but here we don't have a case of the lowest bidder screwing up maintenance of a potentially dangerous piece of infrastructure; instead, we have the incumbent breaking aforementioned hardware on purpose, and blaming it on the lowest bidder.
Honestly, I think China got this right. Business is business, but when you start screwing with critical infrastructure, a firing squad should be on the table. And in this case, at least months to years of prison.
In this case the lower offer was 22mln PLN, whereas the manufacturer's offer was 25mln.
And if the manufacturer could have justified the additional $3mln in cost besides "vendor lock in" maybe they wouldn't have to break the law to keep customers coming back.
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It's also great to see others trusting a servicing shop that customers are forced to use no matter how sloppy or incompetent their work.