The Nicosia district development licencing directorate broke its own rules when adding a new floor onto the top of its headquarters, according to a report released by the audit office on Wednesday.

The report wrote that it had initially been planned that with the coming of local government reform last year, the new district development licencing directorate would be housed in the old offices of the Nicosia water board.

However, later changes in the planned staffing levels led the district development licencing directorate to conclude that a new floor would be necessary on top of the building, given that the existing space was deemed inadequate.

As such, the district development licencing directorate said it was an “urgent necessity due to events which the contracting entity could not have foreseen” to build another floor and thus entered into negotiations directly with a contractor without first putting out a tender for the project.

The contract was worth around €1.5 million and the new floor was built in June last year.

However, the audit office raised concerns about the stated time period of 20 days that the project had reportedly taken to be completed.

It wrote that workers from the audit office had conducted visits to the project site on June 5 and June 12 last year, finding that despite the contract for the project only having been signed on June 4, it had “almost been completed” the following day.

It said that in the first instance, a 20-day timeframe for a new floor to be built “did not reflect the actual data since the project was essentially almost complete at the time of the contract’s signing”.

“Furthermore, it was not possible to carry out works amounting to €1.5m within 20 days. Based on the data submitted and the situation on the ground, it can be easily concluded that the works were planned, designed, and began long before the contract was signed,” it said.

It added that this is “incompatible with the provisions of the relevant legislation”.

Further investigations, it said, found that “the study and the construction works of the new floor had begun well before the necessary approvals were obtained”, and before the contract for the project was even signed.

On the matter of the lack of tender, too, the audit office was quick to point out that it did not believe the district development licencing directorate’s version of events regarding why no tender was held.

It was not convinced by the claim that the new floor was an “urgent necessity”, writing that the interior ministry had informed the Nicosia district government’s temporary coordinating council as early as December 2023 regarding the possibility of an increased number of staff at the district development licencing directorate.

In addition, it wrote, a planning permission application was submitted on April 3 last year and a building permission application was submitted 21 days later on April 24.

“Therefore, the argument that the district development licencing directorate resorted to not hold a tender due to time constraints does not appear to be substantiated,” it added, while also pointing out that the law on local government reform was passed by parliament in March 2022.

“If the authorities had planned their moves well, there would have been enough time to follow all the provisions of the law on public procurement,” it said.