Alexander Bondar: Inattentiveness of Participants While Formulating a Tender Bid Is Often the Basis For Its Rejection

On November 7^th, 2015, a meeting with the heads of the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine took place, during which a number the most common violations occurring during public procurement were considered. In particular, these were typical violations by customers, participants and the relevant decisions of the Permanent Administrative Board of the Antimonopoly Committee to review complaints about violation of legislation in the field of public procurement regarding measures taken to remedy such violations.

“Given that a lot of public procurements concern medicines and medical products, the current results of the Board work should be carefully perceived by the market,” said Olexander Bondar, a senior lawyer at Legal Alliance Company. - The current problem is the absence of clear legislative requirements, definitions and explanations of authorized bodies on some issues. Thus, despite the fact that certain decisions of the Board can be perceived by specialists as being rather subjective, they create the practice that must be taken into account when there are gaps in the legislation."

Summing up the results of consideration of complaints for the last month, the Board drew attention to the common error of participants, which is the inconsistency of the bid’s wording regarding the amount of the bank guarantee and the requirements of the tender documentation. For example, a customer requires a bank guarantee in the amount of UAH 10,000,000. The guarantee is formulated as “up to UAH 10 million, within UAH 10 million" and the like. Including in connection with the above, the procurement of fuel for Ukrzaliznytsia at a cost of approximately UAH 2 billion was not carried out.

In addition, during the briefing, other issues related to the qualification of a formal error in a tender bid, discriminatory conditions in tender documentation, as well as certain contractual requirements, etc. were discussed.