A roundtable discussion on the activities and problems of public procurement in Prishtina

Prishtina, July 22, 2014 –Today, FOL Movement has organized a roundtable discussion in Prishtina on the topic “Public procurement activities in the first six months of the year.” During this meeting was presented a report with summarized statistics on procurement activities initiated by Prishtina municipality.

Kenan Tora from FOL Movement said that the purpose of that meeting was to discuss the possible problems and irregularities that might go with the development of public procurement procedures in Prishtina Municipality. He further went on with the findings of the report of the municipality stating that during the first 6 months of this year Prishtina Municipality has announced 64 contract notices, 43 notices of contract award, 13 cancellation notices and 3 cancellation of the contract award. During this period the Procurement Review Body, as an authorized and obligated body according to the Law on Public Procurement for the purposes of adjudicating complaints in cases of public procurement activities in public institutions, has taken two decisions against the Municipality of Prishtina by returning 2 tenders for reevaluation. Regarding the problems that are generally present in public procurement, he stressed the problem of non-standardization of the drafting process of the tender dossier, exceptionally low prices, non-coordination between different institutions and non-professionalism of evaluation committees.

Meanwhile the mayor of Prishtina, Shpend Ahmeti said that among the first measures taken since they came to power was the opening of the monitoring procurement office for civil society. After that according to Ahmeti “the municipality is planning the development of a software in order to see all the data of economic operators who apply, it would make more transparent the activitiy ofpublic procurement, while the third phase according to his opinion is a better reorganization and changes that should be made, in order for the municipality to be prepared to respond to all the requests and therefore have a good government.” Ahmeti continued by admitting that there are general problems as mentioned in the FOL’s report and added that the director of procurement should be civil staff and not political staff, so there will be no impacts from politics to him, the PRB has to be much more professional than it is and it should be compiled a list of reference prices and thus we do not have to deal with low prices. According to Ahmeti the compilation of “the list of non-serious companies” and a better management of contracts will contribute that this process has no troubles.

Xhevat Simnica, director of procurement in the municipality of Prishtina, said that the problem of exceptionally low prices has a direct impact on the quality of implementation of contracts and a better monitoring of the implementation of the contracts will affect that that public money is not misused by manipulation of exceptionally low prices.

Muhamet Selmani, a PDK member of assembly in Prishtina Municipality, said the municipality of Prishtina in terms of procurement is well consolidated, and as a result it has also helped in realization of projects. But he also said that during this 6-month period the municipality is characterized by low dynamic of realization of capital projects and this will negatively affect the well spending of the budget at the end of the year. Selmani also emphasized the importance of qualitative implementation of contracts.

The problem of low dynamic of implementation of projects and procurement plan for 2014 was also mentioned by Osman Bllaca from INPO.