Public Procurement Act to be amended in December at the earliest

The Public Procurement Act will be amended in December at the earliest, a survey of klassa.bg found. By then, the analysis of BORKOR (the Bulgarian abbreviation of the Centre for Combating Corruption and Organised Crime) on corrupt practices in the law should be ready. “Our colleagues are now analysing two acts – the old one and the new draft, comparing them. It can be noticed that the new law contains prerequisites for such practices,” said Eleonora Nikolova, Acting Director of head of BORKOR. According to her, the gaps in the act, adopted in 2004 and recently amended on May 18, 2012, were not made intentional, but were due to the fact the foreign models were automatically copied into the Bulgarian draft, resulting in legal ambiguities, which in turn, seriously injure companies’ interests and even deprive them of the opportunity to complain of the tenders. “It is logical to wait for the proposals to all institutions responsible for public procurement and then pass the respective amendments to the act,” Krasimir Tsipov, MPP from GERB (Citizens for European Development of Bulgaria) and member of the Parliamentary Legal Committee, told klassa.bg.

The controversial Chapter 8

The problem of non-transparency is contained in the Public Procurement Act and concerns mainly small public procurement orders. On the proposal of the Council of Ministers from February, a provision was included in Chapter 8 of the law, stipulating that bids shall be collected by a public invitation. This method is applicable to candidates for services worth up to BGN 66,000. The interests of Alpha Research agency have been recently injured by such a procedure. On Monday, Boriana Dimitrova, Managing Partner of the agency for marketing and social research, told the media that the Ministry of Education had vitiated a public procurement order called Establishing the Effect of Youth Policies on Young People in the Country. It was won by the MBMD institute for marketing and social surveys in a non-transparent manner. The authority completed its work on June 20, a day before the set deadline for collection of applications for the tender, without informing the other candidates. As Alpha Research had not presented the additional documents, required by the committee, it was removed from participation in the tender.

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