Like buses, we wait ages for new trade deals and then they all show up at once. Just a few days apart, the EU has concluded trade deals with Mercosur and Vietnam. The first was 20 years in the making and second probably some time less.
As for what matters to me, both deals include provisions on opening public procurement markets although the exact details are not known at the moment
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