Collusion in public procurement consists in anticompetitive agreements among tenderers to increase prices, restrict volume and/or lower quality. It is commonly referred to as bid rigging and is a flagrant violation of competition law. Effective prevention and detection of bid rigging requires:
- good co-operation between competition authorities and contracting authorities as well as other public bodies;
- adequate reporting of suspicious bidder conduct by procurement officials to the competent competition authorities; and
- high awareness of the risks and costs of bid rigging by the private sector.
This 2-year project ran from September 2024 to September 2026 with the aim of helping Austria, Bulgaria, Croatia, Cyprus, Greece and Romania improve bid-rigging prevention and detection. The project is funded by the European Union via the Technical Support Instrument.
Project outputs include:
- Capacity building for the public and private sectors, through a series of workshops hosted in each of the beneficiary countries.
- A report with good practices and lessons learnt in fighting bid rigging.
- A training pack to support compliance with competition law in public contracts.
- Suggestions for co-operation between competition authorities and contracting authorities and/or other public bodies in the same jurisdiction.
