From last to winner: how a company won an ARTE tender with a rival’s certificate

An international public tender launched last year by the Agency for the Technological Reform of the State (ARTE), formerly AMA, for the “supply of a digital identity biometrics solution for the public administration”, with a base price of around three million euros, is mired in controversy and has ended up in court.

The tangle centres on the second of two lots, for which three companies bid. The one that had come third at the preliminary stage ended up winning the jury’s final assessment, by proposing to use technology owned by the company that had initially come first and was ultimately beaten. On top of that, with the technological solution already in its final stretch, there are doubts as to whether the technology actually delivered matches the one the agency contracted — an agency chaired since October 2025 by Manuel Dias, the State’s CTO.