Competition and Public Procurement

Abstract

The developments discussed in this survey article show that the interaction between competition and public procurement law keeps getting stronger. The survey relies on examples from EU jurisdictions to show that competition authorities clearly target instances of bid rigging as one of their top enforcement priorities. However, the quashing of some of these decisions in judicial review in Sweden also shows the need for refined bid rigging analysis, as some national courts are unwilling to accept the categorisation of bid rigging as an anticompetitive agreement ‘by object’ (II). The article also reports on how the UK’s competition authority has sought to develop screening algorithms to facilitate the detection of collusive practices by contracting authorities and to involve them in decentralised enforcement efforts against bid rigging (III). Moving from enforcement to advocacy, the article focuses on the Danish competition authority’s remarkable effort to educate contracting authorities and the market on the acceptable limits to collaboration in the tendering and execution of public contracts through new guidelines (IV).