WASHINGTON — A federal judge delayed a lawsuit over a massive Pentagon cloud-computing contract Amazon.com Inc. was favored to win so the government could investigate what it said was “new information” on possible conflicts of interest in the procurement process.
Senior Judge Eric Bruggink of the U.S. Court of Federal Claims ordered the stay on Tuesday “while the Department of Defense reconsiders whether possible personal conflicts of interest impacted the integrity of the JEDI Cloud procurement,” according to his order.
Read: The JEDI war: Amazon, Oracle and IBM battle in mysterious world of military contracts
The order followed a sealed motion seeking the stay by the Defense Department, which is overseeing the Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure cloud, or JEDI, program that could be worth up to $10 billion.
The contract was expected to be awarded this spring. Rival Oracle Corp. ORCL, +0.58% sued to halt the process until the government thoroughly investigates Oracle’s claims of alleged conflicts, which center on a former government employee who worked at Amazon AMZN, +1.22% before and after playing a role in the Pentagon’s procurement process. The Defense Department largely dismissed conflict of interest claims earlier, making Tuesday’s motion to seek the stay a potential turning point.
An expanded version of this report appears on WSJ.com.
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