Brussels, 02/12/2015 (Agence Europe) - On Tuesday 1 December, Internal Market Commissioner Elzbieta Bienkowska and her counterpart at Regional Policy, Corina Cretu, provided an update on efforts to combat fraud and irregularities in cohesion-policy related public procurement contracts.
The two commissioners announced that an action plan would be published putting in place “more robust” public procurement procedures for contracts related to cohesion policy. There are more than 60 ex-ante conditions to ensure transparency in public procurement, a source has revealed. Currently, eight member states are failing to comply with them: Romania, Greece, Croatia, Slovakia, Italy, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria and Hungary.
The two commissioners have thus decided to politicise the action plan, as it has thus far been limited only to a technical level publication. The aim is to encourage the countries involved to put in place the necessary corrective measures to remedy the situation. “If the conditions were not met, then those states could face possible suspension of funding”, the source added.
In September, the EU Court of Auditors published an alarming report on the use of funding (see EUROPE 11389). Subsequently, the European Commission brought forward guidelines to cut errors linked to the award of public contracts (see EUROPE 11422). (Original version in French by Pascal Hansens)