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Links I Liked [Public Procurement]

Pedro Telles

Aug 4, 2015 — 1 min read

1. Portuguese Audit Court unimpressed with PFI/PPP hospital (Portuguese only). The Audit Court analysed the first couple of years of the Loures privately managed hospital in Portugal and did not find significant management improvements in comparison with the best publicly managed hospitals. Its management is better than average for the country, but that is pretty much it. (NB: I was involved in a minor capacity as a lawyer on the original tender procedure back in 2004/2005, which was never concluded. I was not involved in the final one.)

2. Conflict of interest in health procurement in Yorkshire. Very interesting. As Albert mentioned on Twitter, if only the Public Contracts Regulations 2015 were applicable to this case... (his comment; my comment). PS: This situation would be dead easy to solve in Portugal...

3. How technology and a small team is changing procurement in the US. Well, not only procurement but Government in general.

4. Sidney adopts e-ink for some traffic signs. Now that is innovation. Well done. Oh, and Sheffield is creating a SmartLab to find new solutions for problems the city have. Now if only they matched the design/development stage with actual procurement...

5. No water cannons for Boris Johnson. At least he did some savvy procurement by getting the water cannons second hand from Germany. They may be useful as mobile fountains during this scorcher Summer we are having...

6. Speaking of Boris...More on the Roastmaster, sorry Routemaster. Great write up by the Guardian on the Routemaster bus. Some great insight about the difficulties of doing procurement of innovation well and how costs can quickly spiral out of control. I am still puzzled by the assumption that the bus could be sold in other markets and if that happened (it did not) it would have an effect on the price TFL would pay for the bus. Wondering what kind of intellectual property agreement exists between TFL and Wrightbus. In any event, there is no innovation without risk. There is no innovation without failure.

On case C-652/22 Kolin Inşaat Turizm Sanayi ve Ticaret

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

All steam ahead with the revision of the procurement Directives

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

The Portuguese Audit Court finds systemic abuse of direct awards

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 Public Procurement Data Space is upon us

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

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On case C-652/22 Kolin Inşaat Turizm Sanayi ve Ticaret

All steam ahead with the revision of the procurement Directives

The Portuguese Audit Court finds systemic abuse of direct awards

The Public Procurement Data Space is upon us