No 24 (December 2000/Décembre 2000/Dezember 2000)

On November 30, the Internal Market Council discussed the state of progress of negotiations on the European Commission’s package of amendments to simplify and modernise the EU public procurement Directives (see SMN 22).

These Directives impose competitive tendering for public contracts, transparency and equal treatment for all tenderers to ensure that the contract is awarded to the tenderer offering best value for money. Contracts for public works and for purchases of goods and services by public authorities and public utilities account for around 14% of the Union’s GDP. Commissioner Frits Bolkestein welcomed the serious efforts being made by the Council and the broad agreement on a number of important aspects, notably electronic procurement and “framework agreements”. He urged the Council to agree these proposals as soon as possible to be able to meet the targets set by the Lisbon European Council (entry into force by 2002). However, the Commissioner expressed his concerns about the direction in which discussions are evolving in Council as regards the provisions aimed at introducing more flexibility for particularly complex contracts. He warned that “Member States should not use this current exercise of simplifying and modernising the rules as a pretext to water down the crucially important principles of transparency and equal treatment of bidders. If the Commission considered the amendments under discussion went too far in this respect, I would regretfully have to abandon the proposals concerning complex contracts”. He also insisted that “the Commission is not prepared to drop its proposal that contracting authorities should automatically exclude from all procurement procedures people that have been convicted by definitive judgement of criminal acts such as corruption, fraud and organised crime”.

For more information,
please contact
Alfonso Mattera
MARKT B
TEL: +32 (0) 22 95 12 33
FAX: +32 (0) 22 95 71 91

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