The CJEU laid down early this week a fairly important judgment on third country access to procurement. On case C-652/22 Kolin Inşaat Turizm Sanayi ve Ticaret the Court concluded that economic operators from third countries neither party to the GPA nor with whom the EU has a deal are
A couple of weeks ago a little birdie told me the Commission wanted to get the ball rolling on the revision of the procurement legal framework within the first 100 days of its term. Well, looks like they want to hit the ground running with the evaluation of the current
Back in 2021 the then Portuguese government decided to make procurement more flexible as to ensure the Recovery and Resilience Facility money was spent quickly. In 2023 I warned about some of the risks that the reform had introduced here and here. Fast forward to 2024 and the Portuguese Audit
The Commission launched last week the PPDS, a service that is expected to aggregate data about public procurement in the EU. In essence it takes the data included in the eForms filled in by contracting authorities and makes it available to anyone. For example, it is possible to check for
Last week, in her speech on the political guidelines for her new term as Commission President, Ursula von der Leyen announced the following in relation to public procurement: "We must also make better use of public procurement – which accounts for 14% of EU GDP. A 1% efficiency gain in
I've just uploaded to SSRN my (draft) entry for the forthcoming Elgar Encyclopedia of EU Law. It's on general principles and here's the abstract: "Public procurement regulation within the EU is subject to a mixture of primary, secondary law and case law. This
A flipside of having commented on the recent Portuguese general election party manifestos is that I now have a record of proposals. None paid much attention to procurement and certainly no one suggested a profound revision of the Public Contracts Code. Fast forward a mere 4 months and that is
Out of the manifestos analysed, the Green Party one is by far the shortest. It is unsurprising then that there is not much to be found about procurement in it. The only proposal it contains is that they will campaign to bring the Prompt Payment Code into law and debar
As with the other manifestos, the LibDem one includes some policy proposals but in general these are bereft of any level of detail. “Expanding the market for climate-friendly products and services with steadily higher criteria in public procurement policy.” Their first proposal comes with a healthy dollop of hand waving
The Labour party manifesto is long and detailed, but the key points related to procurement are quite brief and lacking detail. Nonetheless, the overarching question is that it remains to be seen if those Labour proposals can be achieved without amending the Procurement Act, although I imagine it will be
As with the Portuguese general election back in March I will be analysing the manifestos of (some) political parties running in the UK’s general election. I shall cover the Conservatives, Labour, LibDems and Green as the only 4 parties currently with MPs and running in (roughly) the whole of
The Portuguese government presented last week its 32 point anti-corruption plan. If you remember the coalition’s electoral manifesto, fighting corruption was one of its planks. Four of the 32 proposals are directly connected with public procurement, but the idea of hardening the rules on conflict of interest seems to