Finance Minister Edward Scicluna hailed a ‘big’ improvement registered in recent years in public procurement procedures, saying that an EU benchmark report ranked Malta’s performance above the European average.
Prof. Scicluna made his remark in a brief address at a public procurement conference organised this morning by the Contracts Department, in the run up to a series of changes which will be introduced in three weeks’ time. He noted that public procurement accounted to about €300 million of the government’s annual expenditure.
Quoting from the findings of the 2014 EU benchmark report, he said that Malta's overall performance was above average, at par with Nordic countries.
He noted that the number of contracts for which only one bid had been submitted, had gone down from 18 per cent in 2013 to 10 per cent in 2014. Prof. Scicluna noted that this was a positive development, as it meant a more competitive process.
As for direct orders, he said these were normally the result of the lack of planning, and urgency. While in 2012 direct contracts amounted to 1 per cent of public procurement, by 2014 they had gone down to a negligible rate.
Prof. Scicluna also spoke about efforts to place large orders for certain items which are in great use, in order to get a better price. In this respect he said that in 2014, large contracts amounted to 30 per cent – a sharp increase on 2012 when these constituted a negligible amount.
He added that improvement were also registered in the duration of the adjudicating process itself, which had gone down from 190 days to 115 days in 2014, though there was still room for improvement to reach the 60 days target
As for the changes in the pipeline, Prof. Scicluna said these will be aimed to reduce red tape and increase efficiency.
He said that the remit of a commercial sanctions tribunal set up last year within the finance ministry, will be widened to that it could blacklist any private company for five years, in cases of money laundering, child labour and other serious crimes in any EU state.
In addition, the changes will also pave the way for a complete changeover to a digital procurement process, by 2018.
An Auditor General report on the government’s accounts published last December flagged several instance in which ministries and other public entities had failed to adhere to public procurement regulations.