in Barcelona
3 to 5 Nov 2026
The City of Zagreb, the Croatian capital with 767,131 residents at the 2021 census, has annulled a roughly €40 million procurement for devices to read water meters remotely, after a procedure launched about one year and nine months ago and an anti-corruption raid in May 2026 on its water utility Vodoopskrba i odvodnja (ViO). Mayor Tomislav Tomašević confirmed on 3 November 2026 that he signed the annulment decision, which ViO and the city’s public procurement office published in the Electronic Public Procurement Gazette on 2 November, according to the Croatian news agency APP as carried by Novi list.
A Four-Year Framework With One Supplier
The tender was an open procedure for a four-year framework agreement with a single supplier of devices and equipment for remote reading of water meters, including installation, issued by the City of Zagreb as central purchasing body for ViO under notice 2025/S F02-0002112, according to the decision of Croatia’s State Commission for Supervision of Public Procurement Procedures (DKOM) of 17 March 2026. The tender documents specified LoRaWAN radio modules, which makes the technology choice dependent on a low-power wide-area network covering the whole service area.
The city selected Ikom d.d. on 6 August 2025, with Iskraemeco d.o.o. ranked second. A1 Hrvatska d.o.o. appealed, and DKOM upheld the appeal, annulled the selection decision and ordered the city to reimburse €66,360 in appeal costs within eight days of publication.
What the Procurement Commission Found
DKOM ruled that the city had wrongly rejected A1’s bids for items 1 and 2 because battery life was evidenced through the bidder’s own statements rather than the product catalogue. A later amendment to the tender documents had removed the requirement that such proof come from the manufacturer or its representative, so the rejection had no basis in the documents. The Commission also held that the city could not apply a stricter standard than the one it had written, and that unclear technical terms in submitted message descriptions should have been settled through clarification under Article 293 of the Public Procurement Act rather than rejection.
Index.hr reported separately that DKOM found the sample testing was not documented in a way that allowed later verification, and that Unimetric was also among the bidders; the DKOM text reviewed for this article rests on the grounds above.
The Criminal Investigation
Croatia’s Office for the Suppression of Corruption and Organised Crime (USKOK) raided ViO in May 2026, and investigators suspect the conditions of the procurement were tailored to the selected bidder, Ikom, according to Novi list. The investigation also involved covert surveillance of persons linked to the possible favouring. ViO’s then director Marko Blažević resigned after the raid.
Tomašević said the decision was made by the procedure’s committee, which includes ViO and city procurement office representatives. “Does not mean I make those decisions, because there is a committee for every procedure and I must not influence its work,” he said at a press conference on 3 November 2026, according to Novi list, in a translation from Croatian.
A Network That Does Not Yet Exist
The annulment decision cites changed circumstances, and Tomašević said one of them is that the network over which the devices would transmit readings has not been built. The LoRaWAN network required for remote reading is not yet in place, and a new procurement will follow the pace of its construction.
The finances of the buyer have also changed. According to the decision published in the procurement gazette, ViO is running a significant loss, cut its investment plan in September, and has about €17 million left for new investment this year. The company plans long-term borrowing only for water and sewer infrastructure, energy efficiency and renewable energy.
Benchmarks From Other Water Utilities
Remote reading programmes elsewhere show how the cost scales with meter count and network ownership. Porto-Vecchio in Corsica will fit 12,800 water meters with remote reading in a €1 million project due for completion in June 2028, which works out at about €78 per meter. In the United Kingdom, Connexin secured up to £35 million in October 2026 to extend a LoRaWAN network for smart water metering, a financing that pays for the radio network as a separate asset from the meters.
Zagreb bundled the devices into a single tender while the network that would read them was still unbuilt, which tied a €40 million purchase to infrastructure outside the contract.
Wider Utility Investment
Tomašević linked the case to the capital programme Projekt Zagreb, a water and sewerage investment of more than €400 million financed from EU funds, saying the procurement subjects are ready and that he hopes the contract will be signed soon, though he gave no date. He said comments from the Ministry and from JASPERS, the European advisory facility, on the project documentation prepared by Zagrebački holding have been addressed as far as he knows.
Next Steps
A new tender for remote reading will be issued once construction of the LoRaWAN network sets a timetable, so the first dated milestone is the network’s build programme, which will determine how many of the city’s water meters can be read remotely and when ViO can reopen the €40 million procurement.
