Local view for "http://purl.org/linkedpolitics/eu/plenary/2007-06-21-Speech-4-010"
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"en.20070621.4.4-010"2
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".
Mr President, Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen, the completion and proper operation of our internal market now require that we give economic operators the capacity to conduct their business across the Union. With this in mind, European companies need to be sure that if problems arise, they will have a legislative framework that will enable them to protect their interests.
In the area of public contracts, they must have a guarantee that they will have effective recourse if they consider that their rights have been violated in the process of awarding these contracts. There are already a series of provisions in the national legal systems along these lines. However, the absence of coordinated rules relating to the deadlines for pre-contractual reviews has contributed to allowing a race to sign contracts to unfold, which prevents any objection from being raised against the procedures used once the contract has been signed.
The desire to resolve this problem is the main objective of the text on which the European Parliament is now being asked to reach a decision in plenary, which is the result of a compromise reached with the European Commission and the Council. In this respect I would like to thank the shadow rapporteurs and the various political groups for their excellent cooperation, in a spirit of openness and dialogue. I would also, of course, like to thank the representatives of the Commission and of the Presidency-in-Office of the Council for their availability, expertise and desire to succeed, which made it possible to reach an agreement at first reading.
The final text confirms the general focus of the reform around two main aims: firstly, to preserve the opportunity for candidates to seek a review by providing for the timely postponement of the contract; secondly, to establish a set of adequate penalties, which are essential for preventing violations.
In order to achieve the first objective, Parliament, the Commission and the Council propose to establish a minimum standstill period of ten days, fifteen days in some cases, between the decision to award the contract and the signature of the contract, to allow candidates that consider their interests to have been damaged time to seek a review. In order to take into account the realities on the ground, this minimum period shall not apply to a series of situations, particularly in very urgent cases. The specific situations associated with framework agreements will also be exempted from this standstill period, subject to particularly exemplary penalties if irregularities are discovered.
The second major focus of the draft reform concerns the penalties for violation of the rules. On this issue, the compromise reached with the Council and the Commission fully takes up the desire expressed by Parliament to have a set of penalties that are both severe and also adapted to the realities faced by local authorities. Therefore serious violations of the rules will result in the contract being considered ineffective, creating a deterrent for the awarding authorities. These cases include illegal direct awarding of contracts, which the Court of Justice has deemed to be the most serious violation of the rules applying to public contracts. Also affected are violations of the rules regarding framework agreements, and violations that damage tenderers’ chances of winning the contract.
It will not, however, be compulsory for contracts to be considered ineffective in cases of minor breaches, for which the draft reform allows the possibility of applying other, less drastic penalties. It shall also be possible to be exempted from the rule of ineffectiveness of contracts if imperative public-interest reasons require that the contracts remain effective, subject, of course, to safeguards that Parliament wanted and secured.
Based around these two objectives, the draft reform submitted to you for the vote is a balanced text that gained the support of representatives of Parliament and of the Commission and the Council. It was finalised under a tight schedule, and offers a series of guarantees that are necessary for economic operators that are candidates for public contracts, without placing excessive constraints on the awarding bodies. If it is adopted today it will enable Europe to take a new step along the path towards harmonising the rules governing its internal market. It will also help to give the Union effective tools to make the practices involved in awarding public contracts more ethical, by reducing the risks of fraud and corruption."@en1
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