The Government approved on Thursday a memorandum that includes a series of measures targeting publicly owned or controlled companies. Basically, the document forces the state-owned companies to participate in public tenders organized by institutions and authorities funded by public money.
According to the Finance Minister Eugen Teodorovici (foto), the memorandum will lead to „increasing the competitiveness of the publicly owned or controlled companies by the public procurement procedures”.
First, a complete list of publicly owned or controlled companies will be drafted, by sectors, subsectors and activities authorized by articles of association.
Then, by order of the President of the National Agency for Public Procurement, an obligation will be set for the contracting authorities to send an invitation of participation to the companies from the list, according to the field of activity.
The third step would be to mandate the state representatives in the boards and general shareholders’ meetings to „decide on the obligation of companies to submit tender offers and participate in the public procurement procedures organized by the contracting authorities from which they received invitations”.
In a second phase, they will see how many of the offers submitted were also winning.
Minister Teodorovici also said there is a positive opinion from the Competition Council for this memorandum and that the act „will bring important changes and maybe a paradigm shift.”
„It is a thing that should have been done very long time ago, and I say that starting today things will change,” Teodorovici said.
The Finance Minister explained the adoption of the memorandum by telling an episode through which the institution he leads went: „We had of course, as any public institution, to contract certain air transport services and we found an unpleasant situation with our national air carrier, which did not submit an offer following our request. The Ministry of Finance has been forced this way to pay – and there are probably many such cases – for a transport on a certain route to where the ministry experts were to reach, instead of about 200 euro, the respective trip, about 500 euro, with an extended route, of course. And then the following question was raised: it means that such situations, in which the state has often had support measures, do not produce the necessary effects.”
