Starting from 2015, about 630 million euros have been awarded from the state budget in tenders without competition. Only one operator participated in the opening of these tenders or other operators were disqualified by predetermining the winner.
More than half of the health sector tenders had only one operator in the competition. Over 6000 tenders were conducted by this sector, amounting to 92 million euros and were awarded without competition.
Municipalities, state-owned enterprises, the Concentrated Purchasing Agency, the Albanian Development Fund and the Road Authority are the sectors that have given the most tenders without competition.
Together they gave over 3000 tenders and their value is 541 million euros. Economics expert Selami Xhepa explains to Euronews Albania the violations of the public procurement law, by avoiding competition.
"In the law of public procurement in Albania, the procurement through competition is the first way provided by law and this presupposes that in more than 90% of cases procurement must be carried out based on competition. "Avoiding competition even in law is allowed only for specific projects, related to national security, defense of the country, ie talking about secret technologies and offered by an operator, while in all other cases the competition is inevitable," he said.
Another tendering procedure that does not guarantee competitiveness is the one with direct negotiation where there is no competition.
In these cases, the contracting authority negotiates directly with the company it selects without announcing a tender notice.
Over 8000 tenders have been awarded by direct negotiation since 2015. Based on the analysis of the Public Procurement Agency (PPA) for 2020 alone, 416 tenders have been awarded without competition and their value reaches the figure of about 48.6 million euros.
The non-competitive contracts are mainly for COVID-19 and Reconstruction. For Xhepa, unopposed tenders feed corruption. According to him, PPA also lack competition.
"Unfortunately, the process, instead of improving, has degraded more. The first feeds directly the corruption and is above all related to the efficiency of public spending and the pronounced weaknesses in the performance of public works. Public procurement practices for PPA contracts need to end. The government itself, which is holding a very critical voice to the practices followed so far in fact in its future projects has projects in very serious figures, which avoid competition, for example the project of more than 2 billion dollars of the port of Durrës, which is a flagrant violation of the public procurement law, because public investments can not be made with special laws, but with the public procurement law", he said.