MEPs on the European Parliament’s Committee on International Trade (INTA) welcomed the re-opening of the International Public Procurement Instrument (IPPI) dossier in an exchange with the European Commission on Wednesday 17 March. According to Jon Nyman, Deputy Head of Unit for Public Procurement at the European Commission’s DG TRADE, the Portuguese Presidency of the EU Council intends to propose a compromise text before July. “We think it is possible to start the trilogues in the second half of the year”, he said.
To this end, the Commission has taken up its proposal made in 2016 for this instrument, which should allow more equal access to public procurement in non-Member States compared to the EU. It will allow an investigation into suspected discrimination in a public contract, consultations with the non-Member State concerned and, finally, sanctions if the distortion is proven. This would mean that the EU would in turn restrict access to its public procurement markets for the country concerned.
On the substance, the expectations of MEPs seem to correspond rather to the proposal made by the European Commission. In particular, they insisted on the need to exclude SMEs and least developed countries from the instrument, as well as to limit the administrative burden for contracting authorities, measures that the Commission had already foreseen in its amended proposal of 2016.
MEP Inma Rodríguez-Piñero (S&D, Spain) stressed the importance of not backing down on this issue: “I hope that we are resuming negotiations in a definitive way”, she said.
On the next steps, rapporteur Daniel Caspary (EPP, Germany) suggested that the European Parliament should be able to table amendments and vote on the text in plenary again. In 2012, the European Commission published its first proposal for a regulation. The first reading vote took place in Parliament in 2014, but the Commission subsequently published an amended version of the proposal in 2016. The file has been pending ever since. “We could ask the Council to adopt a common position by April. And if it fails to do so, we could come back to this issue in May and give ourselves the opportunity to repeat the first reading in Parliament”, he said. (Original version in French by Léa Marchal)