It seems like the trains were programmed to cease functioning if they spent more than 10 days at the GPS coordinates of maintenance shops not owned by the original manufacturer.

This would force the government to rely exclusively on that manufacturer to then fix these trains and perform all future maintenance.

They wanted to prevent third party repair services from being able to repair their trains, so that they could keep those maintenance contracts for themselves.

After sales support, as in spare parts and maintenance, is a big part of income for manufacturers of heavy equipment, as such machines run for a loong time given parts and maintenance. To me they really did not want to lose on 'subscription money' in the form of service contracts they missed out on. It came close to the operator coming back to them to fix the trains 3rd party seemingly couldn't.

>The train manufacturer, Newag, also competed in the tender to carry out the maintenance, but the manufacturer’s bid was about 750k USD higher and the tender was eventually won by SPS, which offered to carry out the maintenance of 11 trains for around 5.5 mln USD.

Vendor lock-in for maintenance has massive financial incentive, as was relatively clear in the article, even going so far as to cite some explicit numbers that are relatively big money when projected across the scale of an entire fleet.

How does that make no sense ? That's the whole point of a business.