EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS

Prague, Czechia

EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS 2022

was in line with the Directive 2014/23 / EC of the European Parliament and of the Council. The Article 16 of the Royal Decree 8/2020 has significant importance for the issue of spending public money on the purchase of resources and services. The Spanish legislature decided that public administration bodies, in particular health care authorities, may use exemptions in order to meet the needs arising from the protection of health and life of people as it is referred to in the Act 9/2017 of 8 November on public sector procurement (BOE No. 272 of 11 September 2017). Pursuant to the Article 119(2) in connection with the Article 153(3), the deadline for announcing a public contract may be shortened to 15 days in the event of an urgent contract. The state of the epidemic is one of the most urgent cases. In turn, in the Article 120, the Spanish legislature provided for the possibility of concluding agreements to suspend the application of the provisions of the public procurement law in extraordinary cases. The contracting authority may sign a contract with a contractor without applying the public procurement regime. In this case, the term of such contract may not exceed one month (Arroyo González, 2021). Also, in the case of Spain, there was no violation of the principles of the European framework of the public procurement system resulting from the Directive 2014/24/EU. The paper discusses four models of legislative responses to the functioning of the public procurement system in the period of the COVID-19 pandemic. The use of public procurement in the context of the expanding pandemic has become quite an important problem due to the need to quickly execute procurement with public money, goods, and services necessary to combat the effects of the pandemic. Under these circumstances, the application of ordinary public procurement procedures could prove disastrous for people’s life and health, and for the functioning of the economy. Such a conclusion results from the analysis of legal acts of all three legal systems. The authors made a preliminary assumption that the European Union law provides the model solution. In this case, it is the Communication of the European Commission of 1 April 2020 (2020 / c 108 I / 01). In turn, the solutions adopted in this Communication are in line with the Directive 2014/24 / EU of the European Parliament and of the Council of 26 February 2014 on public procurement, which is a model solution for legal regulations in this area for the Member States of the European Union. With regard to the application of public procurement 6. The comparative analysis of legal solutions limiting the use of public procurement during the COVID-19 pandemic

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