EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS

EU ANTITRUST: HOT TOPICS & NEXT STEPS 2022

Prague, Czechia

rules, the European Commission in this communication only recalled the solutions already existing in the Directive 2014/24 / EU. Initially, in Poland, on the basis of the regulation of the Minister of Health of 13 March 2020, the state of the epidemic threat was introduced, and on the basis of another regulation of the Minister of Health of 20 March 2020, an epidemic state was called (Borski, 2020). Similar states were introduced in the other two analyzed legal systems. And so – in Spain, pursuant to Article 1 of the Royal Decree 463/2020 in connection with the Act 4/1981 of 1 June 1981 on the emergency and extraordinary states (BOE number 134, de 5 June 1981), a state of emergency was introduced ( estado de alarma ) and also in Italy, on the basis of the Regulation of 31 January 2020, the Council of Ministers introduced a state of emergency ( stato di emergenza nazionale ). In connection with the introduction of states of emergency in these three countries, various types of restrictions were implemented, including those concerning the application of public procurement law. The Polish and Spanish legal systems allowed expressis verbis the introduction of the provisions limiting the application of the ordinary public procurement regime.The earliest to introduce such provisions was Poland – which was under the Act of 2 March 2020, the so-called the first anti-crisis shield. The Italian legislature reacted last, because the relevant legal provisions regarding the application of public procurement provisions appeared in the decree-law n. 10 of 22 May 2020, which is after the publication of the European Commission communication. The limitation of the application of public procurement provisions in relation to medical materials and services related to counteracting the effects of the epidemic caused by the COVID-19 virus was common for the three analyzed legal systems. In addition, in all analyzed legal systems, these restrictions were also extended to the area of combating the negative effects of the pandemic in the area of economics and social support for people who lost their jobs. The limitation of the application of the provisions of the public procurement law consisted basically in reducing the deadline for publication of the notice from 30 days to 14, and in special cases, it was also possible to omit this deadline by awarding a contract without notice. The most common were single-source orders or negotiations with a selected contractor who was able to quickly deliver the necessary funds or provide the necessary services. The Spanish legislature decided that in the event of omitting the negotiations, the service should be provided within one month. A quite original solution was found in the Spanish one, namely the mere possibility of financing research aimed at searching for new drugs to combat COVID-19, by omitting public procurement.

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