THE RMT union has warned that it may take legal action against the Department for Transport if a new West Coast contract is awarded to Virgin Trains.
Transport secretary Patrick McLoughlin is due to tell Parliament on Monday who will be operating the Intercity West Coast service from 9 December, following the collapse of the award to FirstGroup as a result of serious mistakes within the DfT.
His main choices are to ask Virgin to continue operating the service under the terms of a management contract in return for a fixed slice of revenue, or for the DfT's own company Directly Operated Trains to step in, as it has on East Coast.
Persistent rumours have been suggesting that he is likely to choose Virgin, but there have been reports that awarding such a contract without a full tendering process, for which there would be no time, could breach European procurement law.
FirstGroup, which lost the potential contract after the DfT's errors were revealed last week, has remained silent over whether it is taking legal action, but the RMT has said it is taking legal advice today to see if a new Virgin contract would break the rules.
The union says that if its legal advisers do confirm irregularities it will 'be looking' to mount a legal challenge on its own, irrespective of what action FirstGroup might take.
RMT general secretary Bob Crow added: "Once again the DfT is leaking like a sieve, just as it did when First were awarded the WCML in August, with briefings flying around that a short term fix is on the cards to keep Richard Branson quiet and avoid the logical move to public ownership of the railways which the vast majority of the British people support.
"The Government stand on the brink of compounding the expense, instability and shambles that is rail privatisation on the basis of pure right wing ideology. It would appear that under EU law a management contract with Virgin is against procurement rules, rules that can be conveniently ignored when it suits Government policy in favour of private greed."