Monti aims to ensure ‘fair’ public procurement deals

Date: 11/02/1999

By Peter Chapman

Internal Market Commissioner Mario Monti is set to unveil draft guidelines designed to ensure fair play when public authorities award 'concessions' to private companies to operate services such as toll roads and motorway maintenance facilities across the Union.

A spokeswoman for Monti said the move was aimed at plugging a gap in the EU's public procurement regime. She added that the new guidelines would also cover other forms of partnership between the private and public sectors.

The Union's existing rules on public procurement only explicitly cover concessions to carry out infrastructure work such as the construction of new roads or bridges.

These include the need to publish calls for tender in the EU's Official Journal and rules governing what contacts are permitted between contracting and bidding parties prior to a decision being made on who should be awarded the contract.

Although existing Union competition and single market rules do apply to concessions as well as public-private partnerships, officials say the lack of any explicit mention of concessions makes it difficult for these to be applied consistently across the EU.

The planned 'interpretative' guidelines will spell out the principles which public authorities and bidders should follow in issuing calls for tenders for services concessions.

Monti's spokeswoman added that the Commission had promised to add the guidelines to the EU's existing procurement directives at a later date.

The institution's latest move to ensure a genuine single market in public procurement follows a policy review last year which also included plans to reform existing EU legislation governing other areas such as the public utilities sector.

The Commission has stressed that it has no intention of intervening in the decisions taken by public authorities in the member states on how they run their services.

Instead, it emphasises its aim of making sure that contracts are awarded after a fair EU-wide competition, "ensured by prior publication of a notice and a minimum of procedural rules".

At the same time, the guidelines will tackle some "urgent interpretative problems" which have arisen over the awarding of contracts for the EU's Trans-European Network projects. Many of the TENs schemes are carried out by partnerships between the public and private sectors.

One key issue the forthcoming guidelines will aim to resolve is the establishment of clearer rules on how far private firms which win TENs contracts should be permitted to subcontract work on these projects to other companies.