Kosovo Democratic Institute (KDI) today held a roundtable on current public procurement practices and how centralized procurement processes can be improved.

On this occasion, it is published the report “Millions for Cent”, which presents the findings of KDI from the monitoring of the procurement process to the Central Procurement Agency (CPA). Specifically, the procurement process for the contract: Fuel Supply at the local level undertaken by CPA.

Blerim Gjoni from KDI, presented the findings and recommendations of this report emphasized that some of the current problems of this sector have been addressed through it and concrete recommendations have been made on preventing the loss of public money and increasing accountability in public procurement.

Gjoni, stated that based on the monitoring of the contract in question it emerges that the institutional actions were not in accordance with the legislation in force and the good procurement practices such as: deficiencies in planning the procurement activity, discriminatory criteria in tendering, numerous delays in procurements until signing of contracts as a result of multiple complaints, awarding abnormally low tenders and no effective monitoring of contract enforcement.

“The contract notice for this tender was published in December 2016 to extend the procurement process until July 2018. The protracted process was the result of numerous complaints from Bidders against CPA decisions, through which the latter expressed dissatisfaction with the assessment of tenders according to some unfounded legal criteria set out in the tender dossier, where some of these complaining claims were later referred by the PRB as grounded, “he explained.

Complaints were also concerned with the award of contracts with abnormally low prices. In this regard, Gjoni stated that awarding contracts at abnormal low prices is dangerous for the contracting authority and for the public interest in general. “The abnormally low tenders may fail, especially in cases where an economic operator misunderstood the complexity of contract performance or did not take into account all the costs and risks of the procurement,” he continued.

In addition to selecting economic operators, the CPA also had the role of contract enforcement monitors, and according to Gjoni there was stagnation at this point.

In order to eliminate problems from awarding contracts with low abnormal prices, KDI recommends that CPA should treat carefully abnormally low bids.

Also, KDI recommends that with the aim of increasing the quality of the decisions, the PRB should carefully review the findings of the Review Expert, the available evidence and arguments submitted by the parties to the proceeding.

It is also recommended that the PPRC, as a procurement supervisory institution in Kosovo, should be more proactive in monitoring procurement activities with abnormally low tenders – as a widespread

phenomenon, particularly in fuel supply contracts and to provide an opinion overall on this issue that would eliminate the likelihood of repeating similar problems in the future.