King’s College, London – GWU Law School Annual Symposium: Exclusion and Debarment – 18 March 2019

Effective international trade in government procurement depends on predictable legal structures, including those that address corruption and misconduct in tender processes.  But at this point, the purchaser’s primary tools to maintain integrity — debarment or exclusion — remain wildly out of sync on both sides of the Atlantic.  This annual free symposium on transatlantic issues in procurement, hosted by King’s College London and George Washington University Law School, focused this year on debarment and exclusion. In a highly successful day of frank and collegial discussions, judges, officials, attorneys and professors from the multilateral development banks, the European Union and the United States joined to discuss the best ways forward to harmonize a common approach to debarment in international trade.

Please note (see below) that because of the strong interest in this program, it was moved to a larger room at Gray’s Inn.

Members of the “GWU” team at the symposium at Gray’s Inn (left to right): Professor Michal Kania (Fulbright scholar), Program Director Karen Thornton, Ruairi Macdonald (alumnus), John Pachter (alumnus and panelist), Paul Khoury (alumnus and panelist), Collin Swan (alumnus and panelist), Alix Town (alumna), and Professor Christopher Yukins (symposium co-chair)
Collin Swan (World Bank), Michal Kania (University of Katowice) and Dominique Casimir (Arnold & Porter, Washington DC)

Change of Venue: The Pensions Room, Grays Inn, 8 South Square, London, WC1R 5ET (map) (map of access to Grays Inn during construction)

Reservation page here

Program materials

Introductions (10-10:15)

Panel I: Establishing an Exclusion System (10:15-11:15)

Panel I: Dominique Casimir (Arnold & Porter), Lisa Miller (World Bank), Duc Nguyen (U.S. Environmental Protection Agency), Olivier Waelbroeck (European Debarment & Exclusion System (EDES)) and Kai Hooghoff (Bundeskartellamt (Federal Cartel Office) Germany)

Panel II: Sanctions and Exclusions at the Multilateral Development Banks (11:30-12:30)

Panel II: Lisa Miller (World Bank), Prof Christopher Yukins (GWU), Collin Swan (World Bank) and Paul Kearney (European Bank for Reconstruction and Development)

Lunch(12:30-13:30)

Panel III: View from the Private Bar(13:30-14:30)

Panel III: John Pachter (Smith Pachter, McLean VA), Paul Khoury (Wiley Rein, Washington DC), Vera Eiro (Linklaters, Lisbon), Michael Bowsher QC (symposium co-chair/moderator, Monckton Chambers & King’s College, London) and Pascal Friton (BLOMSTEIN, Berlin).
  • John Pachter, Christopher Yukins & Jessica Tillipman, U.S. Debarment:  An Introduction (discussion draft 24 February 2019), forthcoming in Cambridge Handbook of Compliance (Cambridge University Press, Daniel Sokol & Benjamin van Rooij eds.).
  • Pascal Friton, Debarment in EU Public Procurement Law – Tentative progress or treading water? (presented at Thomson Reuters Government Contracts Year in Review (Feb. 2019))

Panel IV: Interactions Between Public Procurement and Civil and Criminal Claims (14:30-15:30)

Panel IV: Prof Christopher Yukins (GWU), Prof Renato Nazzini (King’s College, London), Anna Caroline Mueller (WTO) and Prof Alison Jones (King’s College, London)

Robert D. Anderson, Alison Jones & William E. Kovacic, Preventing Corruption, Supplier Collusion and the Corrosion of Civic Trust: A Procompetitive Program to Improve the Effectiveness and Legitimacy of Public Procurement (George Mason Law Review, forthcoming 2019).

Tea (15:30-16:00)

Panel V: Judges Panel (16:00-17:oo)

Panel V: Judge Marc Steiner (Swiss Federal Administrative Court), Judge Christopher Vajda (Court of Justice for the European Union), Prof Carl Baudenbacher (former Chief Judge of the EFTA Court, Monckton Chambers), Michael Bowsher QC (Monckton Chambers/King’s College, London), Judge Katja Hoegh (Chair, Ostre Landstret (High Court of Eastern Denmark), Copenhagen), Judge Helena Rosen Anderrson (Swedish Supreme Administrative Court)

Reception (17:00)

Supplemental Materials

  • Emmanuelle Auriol & Tina Søreide, An Economic Analysis of Debarment, 50 Int’l Rev. L. & Econ. 36 (2017) (arguing that debarment needs to be rethought in light of its competitive impacts)
  • Presentation by Prof Michal Kania at the University of Florida, January 2019, on U.S. and European approaches to debarment and corporate compliance
  • Christopher R. Yukins & Michal Kania, Suspension and Debarment in the U.S. Government: Comparative Lessons for the EU’s Next Steps in Procurement, 19-2 UrT 47 (2019), available at https://ssrn.com/abstract=3422499

Background materials by panelists (from a fall 2018 seminar at GWU):

Published by

Christopher Yukins

Professor Christopher Yukins teaches in the government procurement law program (founded in 1960) at The George Washington University Law School in Washington, D.C.

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