CONTRACTORS: Half of the Romanian public tenders are preferentially assigned

About 44% of the contracts assigned through the Romanian electronic public tenders system (SEAP) in the last seven years and about 48% of their total value were attributed in a preferential way, on the basis of political connections to the funders of parties or other links of decision-makers, according to a study published by the Romanian Academic Society (SAR). The institution headed by Alina Mungiu Pippidi analyzed all public works contracts in the period 2007-2013 valued at over a million euro each, respectively a total of 6,064 documents summing more than 32.4 billion euro. "Between 2007 and 2013, one of seven contracts financed by European funds and one of three funded by the Government were attributed even if there was a single bidder attending the auction", the document states. According to the same source, since 2008, there were awarded 100,000 contracts per year, in 2009 and 2010 under the SEAP being registered more than 122,000 deals annualy. "The auction number was drastically reduced in 2013, when there were published only 81,000 contracts. The total value of the contracts directly assigned increased from 38,710 acquisitions in 2007 to over 1.1 million acquisitions in 2013. However, the number of public authorities which organized auctions using the SEAP platform increased from 5,591 in the early 2008, to 11,551 at the end of 2009 and to 13,515 in 2012. In the past two years, more than 2,000 contracting authorities were enrolled in the electronic procurement system, their number reaching in 2014 around 14,721 entities", is stated in the SAR analysis. According to the organization, the construction companies have contracted about 58% of the total annual public procurement published on SEAP. In 2007, when the electronic system was put into operation, public construction spending totaled more than 7 billion euro. In 2009, their total value reached 11.6 billion euro (in that year were organized two rounds of elections for the European Parliament and Presidency), but in 2010 the total amount allocated for construction contracts decreased to 6 billion euro. This indicator rose again to 10.6 billion euro in 2011, in 2012 and 2013 being stabilized at about 9.1 billion euro.