Public acquisitions framework requires improvement and flexibility says ZRP

Public acquisitions in Romania are worth tens of billions of euros each year and are important business for many companies. But while progress has been made in recent years with regard to their legal framework there is a need for further improvement and more flexibility, according to a recent report put together by law firm Zamfirescu Racoti Predoiu.

This can also be seen from the value of contestations related to public acquisitions dealt with by the National Council for the Solving of Contestations (CNSC) which reached over EUR 13 billion last year. According to the CNSC activity report for 2011, 39 percent of the contestations formulated last year were related to tender documentation while the remaining 61 percent had to do with the result of the tender. Some 32 percent of the contestations addressed last year were admitted.

According to the report, some of the problems companies interested in participating in public tenders face in Romania include the setting of excessive participation conditions for bidders by the contracting authority and overestimating the value of the contract which leads to some offers being disqualified because they are considered excessively low, said Laura Iarca, senior associate with ZRP. Other issues are that sometimes the contestation options available to bidders are inefficient and the authorities can confuse the qualification criteria and the content of the technical offer.

At present the authorities plan to bring several changes to the Emergency Ordinance 34/2006 including imposing the obligation that contracting authorities list all the qualification criteria in the tender documentation and publish the name of the public workers taking the decision in the public bid so that there is no conflict of interest. Also, the authorities want to change the share under which a bidding price is considered unusually low.

Simona Bazavan