Are you already familiar with amendments to Public Procurement Law?

The National Assembly of the Republic of Serbia adopted the Law on Amendments to the Law on Public Procurement which entered into force on 12 August 2015, with the exception of the provisions governing the duty to report corruption, which shall be applicable as of 1 January 2016.

These amendments essentially seek to further improve the public procurement system (by increasing efficiency and cost-effectiveness of public procurement procedures, ensuring a greater competition among the bidders) and to achieve compliance with the EU directives which were adopted in this field of public procurement in 2014.

In association with the law firm Tomic Sindjelic Groza, eKapija would like to point to the most interesting amendments from the viewpoint of the bidder in further text.

Under the most recent amendments, the limit for smallvalue public procurements has been increased from 3,000,000 RSD to 5,000,000 RSD.

The mandatory requirement that the bidder has not been prohibited from performing the business activity by any measure has been deleted from the Law, because, in practice, this requirement often led to elimination of bidders, or incorrect bids due to wrong dates in the certificates.

The amendments have simplified the mandatory contents of the agreement whereby the bidders from the group pledge, to themselves and to the contracting authority, to execute the public procurement. Thus, the mandatory elements of the agreement include only those that are indeed relevant to performance and execution of public procurement, specifically the information about the leading member of the group, or the one who will make the bid and represent the group of bidders before the contracting authority and the liabilities of each bidder from the group in contract implementation.

The contracting authorities are no longer under the obligation to reject bids over bidders’ negative references, but are allowed to provide for such an option in the tender documentation.

The contracting authorities may award the contract to the bidder whose bid involved a price higher than the estimated value of the public procurement, provided that the price offered is not higher than the comparable market price and that the offered prices in all relevant bids are higher than the estimated value of the public procurement.

Another novelty is the Decision on awarding the contract and the time limit for filing requests for protection of rights. This is an important amendment because the decision on awarding the contract is no longer sent to all bidders, but is published on the Public Procurement Portal and on the contracting authority’s website, which practically means that all bidders are now “forced” to regularly and diligently follow the internet notifications in public procurement procedures they had taken part in, since the period for filing a request for protection of rights against the decision on awarding the contract commences to run as of the day of publication on the Public Procurement Portal.

For more detailed information, take a look at the PDF file below or contact lawyer Predrag Groza from the law firm Tomic Sindjelic Groza at predrag.groza@tsg.rs.