If the Competition Council (CC) finds potential signs of the infringement of Competition Law or suspects that market participants have prohibited the Law, but the infringement is not repeated, and it has not affected a big share of the market and society, in that case, the authority uses alternative method – warning –for prevention of the infringement without formal initiation of the case. The institution has been using this approach since 2015, when the CC introduced a Case Prioritizing strategy, concentrating its limited resources on the most significant violations with a greater impact on a particular market.
In the first half of 2021, the CC has been an active proponent of prevention. It has performed five prevention procedures, warning a total of 15 legal persons. These alerted companies represent such areas of activity as construction of residential and non-residential buildings, construction and repair works, rental of construction machinery and equipment, installation of electrical installations, real estate activities, incl. renting and operating of own or leased property.
In all these cases, the CC discerned suspicions about coordinated applicants' bids of tenderers in public procurement. For example, in one of the cases, market participants used the same sub-contractor, i.e., by attracting the same specialists and submitting an identical draft of the object to the customer, they submitted similar offers for contract prices in the procurement. Similarly, in such cases, where the institution assesses the pre-existing features of the infringement in public procurement, coincidences are still observed in the text of the tender itself, for example, in technical tenders.
Another additional risk that may lead two independent market participants to submit coordinated tenders in the procurement is the involvement of the same authorized representative – consultant or external service provider – to prepare and submit the tender to the contracting authority in the Electronic Procurement System. During the prevention organized by the CC, the authorized person admitted the non-compliance of his actions with the Competition Law. At the same time, the companies did not even think about the fact that such actions could lead to the most severe violation of the Competition Law. The timely prevention of such possible infringements is facilitated by the active action of the contracting authorities, which can be the first to notice suspicious coincidences in the tenders.
