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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Hello, welcome to this, the latest in our series of webinars on important developments in procurement reform around the world. This, in fact, this webinar is about arguably the most important procurement reform going on around the world in the European Union, a proposed regulation regarding procurement. Thank you very much for joining us today.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: My name's Chris Yukins, I'm the Lynn David Research Professor in Government Procurement Law at George Washington University Law School. I am going to be helping coordinate today's program. The program materials in the… including the chat from today, are going to be available on PublicProcurementInternational.com, and later today on the GW Law Government Procurement Law Program.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: YouTube page. While we have the Q&A open, if you can possibly use the chat, that's better, because we create a record from the chat. So our preference would be, if possible, to use the chat, and we'll be responding to you in those chats.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: This I should emphasize that we have several speakers who hold public office and want to emphasize that their statements today or in their personal capacities. Now we have nearly 800 registrants. This morning we had 785 registrants.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: And what was fascinating about the registrants is actually not that we just covered — we covered essentially the entire European continent.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: but that we importantly have listeners and watchers from around the world. And what this tells us is that the entire world is interested in what's going on in the European Union in the regulations.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: We're very, very glad that we're able to share this information. And I've really, myself, I've been startled with the huge worldwide interest.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: and what's going on in the European Union.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: The resources, as I said, are going to be available on Public Procurement International. We're going to be talking… those resources cover the various topics we'll be covering this morning, the use of regulation as opposed to directives, different competitive methods, the old and new. We'll be talking about… there's materials there on e-procurement integration, and on strategic autonomy, the European preference that we'll be talking about.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Just briefly, I want to introduce our speakers. I'm going to do this in alphabetical order. Dr. Gian Luigi Albano currently works at the National Central Purchasing Office in Italy in Consip. He's an adjunct professor of economics at University Luis G. Carli in Rome, as well as a research fellow at the Utrecht University Center for Public Procurement.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: He obtained his PhD in economics from the Universite Catholique de Louvain in Belgium. He's the co-author of the book, The Law and Economics of Framework Agreements, Designing Flexible Solutions for Public Procurement, which is published

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: in Cambridge University Press. He serves as an associate editor of the Journal of Public Procurement. He is an expert on public procurement for the European Commission, the Inter-American Development Bank, the OECD, and the World Bank. In October 2024, Dr. Albano was elected Fellow of the U.S. National Academy of Public Administration.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Professor Roberto Caranta is a full professor with the Law Department at the University of Turin in Italy. He works in public procurement with focuses on sustainable public procurement remedies.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: and on EU and administrative comparative law with a focus on judicial protection. He served as a coordinator of the Sustainability and Protection Procurement in International, European, and National Systems of Sapiens International Training Network.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Vice Chair of the Procurement Review Board of the European Space Agency. He's published extensively on issues of European public procurement, including on the EU preference that he'll be discussing today. Many of his publications are linked on the program page.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Isabel da Rosa is currently the Deputy Director of Information Innovation at Anacom, Portugal's National Authority of Communications. She was previously Director of Finance, Studies, and Strategies at IMPEC, a Portuguese institute that focused on public procurement.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: She was the vice president of the Justice Financial and Equipment Management Institute, and she served us for six years as a national expert in the European Commission in the fields of digital public policy and digital transformation public procurement. With our co-panelist Tunde Tatrai, she co-authored a groundbreaking study on how to improve data interchange and public procurement across the European Union, which is available on the program page.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Professor Gabriella Racca, my cherished co-moderator, is a full professor of administrative law at the Department of Management at the University of Turin. She coordinates the Jus Publicum Network Review, and she's a member of many international networks. She's on the board of directors of the Italian Institute of Administrative Sciences.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: She teaches at a number of master's programs, including at the United Nations International Training Center. She's published extensively in public procurement reform, including several books that she's co-edited with me, including, importantly, a forthcoming book on digital transformation.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Marc Christopher Schmidt is a policy officer and e-procurement expert at the European Commission. He currently serves as a team leader in e-procurement and has served at the Commission for 10 years on projects such as the ESPD, the electronic version of the European Single Procurement Document.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Before that, he worked as a project leader for XFAGABA, the e-tendering standardization project in Germany.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: As a senior staff member of the Commission, he is regularly involved in management and technical discussions on integrating electronic procurement across the European Union. We're very glad that he could join us today.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Tunde Tatrai is an economist and a lawyer and a full professor at the Corvinus University of Budapest. She's been playing a leading role in international research projects. She regularly helps coordinating a leading international conference on interdisciplinary studies and public procurement, and she is the author of numerous books.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: in international publications. She's a member of the editorial boards of several journals of Public Procurement.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: and a member of the Multi-Stakeholders Expert Group on eProcurement with the European Commission. With our panelist Isabel De Rosa, she was a co-author of an important report on Procurement Data Exchanges in the European Union, which again is linked on the program page.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Pedro Telles is an associate professor in public procurement law at Copenhagen Business School. He was previously a senior lecturer in law at Swanson University and an adjunct at the Law Futures Center at Griffith University, where he worked mostly on Office Procurement EU and Company Law. He describes himself as a recovering lawyer.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Dr. Telles is an expert in public procurement regulation. He has been a leading voice in explaining the new direction that the European Union is taking in procurement regulation. His extensive and learned commentary on the proposed Public Procurement Act is linked on the program page. Last but not least.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Marko Turudic is a regular professor of administrative law at the University of Zagreb Faculty of Law, specializing in EU public procurement concessions and administrative procedures.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: His research focuses on enforcement under the EU Remedies Directive, socially responsible public procurement, and on third country access to the EU Public Procurement Market at the intersection of procurement law, trade policy, and international agreements. He participates and publishes regularly in a number of public procurement journals.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: And is writing a monograph on third country access to EU public procurement markets, which is profiled extensively on the program page.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: With that, I'll turn it over to Professor Rocca to introduce the subjects we'll be discussing today.

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Gabriella Racca: Okay, welcome everybody, thank you for being here. Welcome from the University of Turin, and I'm happy to introduce the topics of such a great panel of leading scholar and very good friends.

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Gabriella Racca: So, starting from the digital exchanges with Mark Christopher, Isabel de Rosa, and Tunde, Tunde, Tantrai, we will focus on what can be considered the most, in my view, disruptive provisions of the regulation, of the draft of the regulation, because public procurement data space

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Gabriella Racca: will change completely the way to collect data. The Commission eProcurement service will be something that we couldn't imagine until recently, and especially the eligibility service. We discussed with Mark Christopher a long time ago from this idea of putting a green light for the suppliers, and

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Gabriella Racca: evolving the system on exclusion grounds and qualification grounds for suppliers, as now it's very, very cumbersome, and we need to collect certificates, especially in some countries. In Italy, we collect certificates. We waste a lot of time in verifying them. So now, with the overcoming self certification, we will also implement

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Gabriella Racca: once only principal, and possibly the supplier will have their own digital wallet. But the problem, the good news would be also that we could not only

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Gabriella Racca: verify the exclusion ground, but also having qualification grounds, and in this way, we would have an evolution of what is the market analysis, because we could have it in place, and possibly we can separate also the two phases of the procurement, having the first phase of qualification and exclusion grounds verification done, and maybe the claims will be separated

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Gabriella Racca: from the submission of offers. So I think this is a very, very great

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Gabriella Racca: issue that we will discuss in a few minutes. The second issue is the one of Pedro on the directive regulation, and now we pass to a regulation. Just the idea is.

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Gabriella Racca: We realize that in this draft of the regulation, we have a lot of provisions that are not directly applicable, so we will require a lot of intervention from the states, so we will have to integrate the regulation with further

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Gabriella Racca: possibly quick intervention of the member states for this implementation. And the core question is, do we want integration in Europe, in the procurement market, because we didn't have it till now. And this is the question. In the US, they don't care of integration in the market, in the procurement market. While in Europe, we wrote this book with

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Gabriella Racca: Professor Yukins on Joint Procurement of Innovation, and we realized that in 2019, but now it's not changed, that integration is not there in Europe, even though for Europe is a goal.

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Gabriella Racca: The third topic is very, very interesting with Gian Luigi Albano, that is how negotiation will evolve in Europe. Open procedure, dynamic innovation, all the special procedure, but

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Gabriella Racca: how this negotiation will evolve. In Europe, the problem is that procurement officials are not ready and trained for doing the negotiation, American style or UK style. So, normally, the procurement officials require

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Gabriella Racca: objective criteria, and we need to have an objective evaluation for assuring impartiality, but also for answering the claims of the supplier. So it will be very difficult to implement these negotiated methods and to the topic to be discussed is, if we want to evolve to a subjective award, as in the US,

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Gabriella Racca: address.

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Gabriella Racca: or we want to remain in an objective award. And so we fold the consequence in the in the formalism of the negotiation.

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Gabriella Racca: And the last topic, and the one that might be the most complex and difficult one, we leave it to Marco and Roberto Caranta, and the strategic autonomy, I think it would be very difficult to implement it. For example, we could

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Gabriella Racca: obviously consider to have reciprocity and fair competition. But the question is, how can we deal with the need, the needed medical devices that we have to get? And so the question, many questions are open. So enjoy the debate. I think we will have a great panel this this afternoon, and I let the floor to Mark Christopher that says

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Gabriella Racca: to leave very, very soon, so he will come first. Thank you very much.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: Many thanks, Gabriela.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: for rearranging it, so… because I have to leave. I will try to see if I'm able to join at the… at the end to follow a little bit the discussion.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: So I will speak about the Public Procurement Act, especially the digital ecosystem.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: If I go to the… can I go to the next slide? Okay.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: So.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: So there are three things that we want to do.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: That we want to achieve with the digital ecosystem. The first one is system integration through interoperability. What do we mean by… do we mean by that is…

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: It should be possible in Europe that an economic operator uses one e-procurement platform to participate in any part procurement procedure in the EU.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: That would lower tremendously the barriers for the companies to participate in Park Procurement in the first place.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: Secondly, we need to streamline the administrative processes.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: Especially on… The exchange of evidence.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: If you… if a company participates in one country, they give the actual evidence. It could be advanced, it could be less advanced.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: But the, the point is if you have… if a company has to participate cross-border, and they need to provide, for example, that they have paid taxes, this often leads to

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: bureaucratic overhead. And we want to actually achieve there already a kind of a traffic light system.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: The third point that we want to achieve is support competitiveness through better data.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: We have, through TED, Tellers Electronic Daily, we have a lot of data on Public Procurement Procedures.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: But the data is not, I would say, sometimes the data quality is not that good.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: And we also do not understand the whole life cycle with this.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: So, we… Want, with this digital ecosystem, to have better data, and to cover the whole life cycle.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: So, maybe on interoperability on the next slide.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: Here you can see what we try to achieve. We have in Europe roughly more than

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: 100, more than 120 e-procurement platforms. In some countries, we have just one platform. In other countries, we have, 10 platforms, maybe even more than 20 platforms. And…

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: The public buyer

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: uses only one platform, which is not a problem for the public buyer, but the economic operator, when they want to communicate with the public buyer, they always, they must use the platform of the buyer, which is a technical barrier.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: And with a future setup, where we have this interoperability network, the aim is that

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: All e-procurement platforms will be connected to this network.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: That means that…

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: If I am, for example, in Belgium, they have a platform, and I'm the economic operator, using usually the Belgian platform, because this is the main platform I'm using.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: I will be able to participate in procurement procedures all over Europe. I can find business opportunities there. I can also get the procurement documents, ask questions, and also to submit my offer through this Interability Network.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: There was already a pilot done two years ago. It showed that it works.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: And, this will be a very critical element. What you can see also here is that the EU plat… we will provide, also an EU platform.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: that buyers or that suppliers can use. For the buyers, it needs to be that the member state says, we want that our buyers use your platform.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: For economic operators that might use our platform, it will be very basic, but the main idea of this EU platforms is that we actually

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: use this as a reference implementation. We have to show that interoperability works, and the aim is also to provide this as open source, and we are collaborating with this with the member states. The idea is not to start from scratch, to develop from scratch.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: The next slide… Shows the future setup.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: I'm sorry, Mark Christopher, can I?

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: Now I can.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Can I ask a quick question, Mark Christopher? Is that okay? Yes, yes.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: Of course, of course.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: We've got a question from the chat. Would the ecosystem be open to procurements under the EU thresholds as well?

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: Very good question.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: In the end, I expect yes. We cannot legislate how Procurement procedures are done below the threshold, but the way we have set up

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: If you go one slide back.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: The… the idea of, the setup is…

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: we will not impose buyers to use a central platform. It was one of the options. There was the idea to say, we as the Commission will provide one central service that has to be used by all buyers, all suppliers, for above the EU thresholds.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: If we would have done this, we would have had a clear separation between above and below, which could have led to even more fragmentation.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: So the idea is to say, we will integrate the solutions, and if the solutions are integrated, we…

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: I would expect that we'll see much more Procurement procedures to take place also below the threshold through the interoperability network.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: That is the end.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: So, the future setup of the eligibility service. We have already some countries where the buyers have access to the national databases, and that will not change.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: What we'll do in… especially for the countries who might not be that advanced, but especially for cross-border, is we, as the Commission, will provide an eligibility service that will be connected to a… we call it digital business credential tool.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: And this digital business credential tool is, where the, it can be the business wallet, it can be the wallet for the natural persons, it could also be the other EU project, the one's only technical system.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: But it could also be that the eligibility service that we will provide will be connected to national services.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: And… The way we want to set it up is that the suppliers who share their…

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: Who share or give the right to the buyer are always in control of their data.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: So it's not that any public buyer can just get any random data about any kind of supplier, but it is that.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: The process is designed in such a way that an economic operator will say, we are… here's our offer, and we will give you, right?

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: To this specific information, for this amount of time.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: And the way we want to also set it up is that We want to move away from the actual exchange of the evidence. We want to move towards metadata.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: It is not relevant for the buyer in the end to see the whole certificate. They want to see that the company has paid its taxes.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: And in the way we want to set it up, there will be also no need for translation, because if we have metadata, we can… the eligibility profile, which is the output of the eligibility service, we can provide it in any official language.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: And it will be, yeah, we even have a kind of a prototype, and the idea is that the output can be used by the buyer.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: to see

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: the results, that they will see green hoax, that the company has paid its tax, but it will also help the buyer to, against our eligibility service, to check the data against the national databases.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: And the third part is the… Public Procurement Data.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Are you in the next slide, Mark Christopher?

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: Yes, next slide, please.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: The current setup of TED is that it is… it varies. Most of the countries have a central e-sender to publish notices on TED, but you have also multiple services.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: And what we actually want to do with this Public Procurement Act, and we see that this is really, really important, we want to empower member states to set up a national public data space. Member states need to take ownership of

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: Public Procurement Data because it is relevant that the policymakers understand how Public Procurement works in their country.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: Already now we see a lot of countries.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: are doing this, Italy, Portugal.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: also France. So a lot of countries already take ownership and put a lot of effort in working with Public Procurement Data, and with this Public Procurement Act, we don't say on how the national Public Procurement Data space will be set up, but…

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: We will empower them to do so, and not only for, the…

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: notices, which we call now public summaries, but also for, the post-award, so everything that deals with information about payments, invoices, etc.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: What I would like to stress here that might be very interesting, we have moved deliberately away in our proposal from the word notices, because notices are very bad when it comes to data quality.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: And notice itself is.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: The data will be

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: in itself, coherent. But when you have, in one procedure, multiple notices, it can be that from one notice to the other notice, they are not coherent anymore.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: So, we are moving away from notices to really a data-driven approach. What this means actually in practice is we have, for example, a public summary on competition.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: And if the buyer wants to say, I awarded the contract to this winner.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: Then they just need to provide exactly this information. They just say, we award this contract to this winner.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: And it will be linked to the public summary of competition. In this way, we are setting up a kind of a data set.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: From the beginning to the end, this really… Really, very critical.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: And, with the next EFOMS amendment, while we still have to stick to the concept of notices, we already will start to move into this direction to more uniquely identify

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: specific data groups in the notices to be able to link it better because now that we have also our public data space, we see it is sometimes very difficult to give to get some kind of coherence from notices to notices.

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Marc Christopher Schmidt: And with this, I'll hand back To you, Gabriela.

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Gabriella Racca: Okay, thank you very much. So, we can pass to, Isabel da Rosa and, Tunde Tunde and Fry. Comment on this, and then possibly later on Q&A.

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Isabel da Rosa: Thank you so much, Gabriella, and thank you so much for Marc to introduce us the topic of digital procurement, what the future will be.

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Isabel da Rosa: At least what we think the future will be.

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Isabel da Rosa: It's my turn also to present a study that we made, me and Tunde at request of the Commission.

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Isabel da Rosa: And in fact.

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Isabel da Rosa: Truth be told, this is a second study, and is the result of the conclusions of the first study.

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Isabel da Rosa: We start by analyzing the performance of transparency and integrity during the performance of the current directives, and there was a lot of interesting conclusions. We set up a set of 24 indicators, and the data quality was, of course, a big

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Isabel da Rosa: issue around the previous study. So, we made a set of recommendations, and basically, the second study

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Isabel da Rosa: Is the development of these initial recommendations.

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Isabel da Rosa: Data quality really has a lot of problems. We don't have all the data we need that's supposed to be in the notices. We have wrong data, we have data that is not consistent. We cannot even have one idea.

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Isabel da Rosa: of the performance of Public Procurement that is close to reality. I don't think this is a problem that is unique to Europe.

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Isabel da Rosa: I think this problem, exists everywhere. Maybe because we have the centralization of the notices in CAD, at least for those above the EU thresholds, it makes it very visible and very easy to understand the status.

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Isabel da Rosa: In fact, as Mark was saying, the PPDS also analyzed these sort of parameters.

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Isabel da Rosa: And currently, if you go today to the PPDS, they have an indicator on data quality, and the indicator has a result of 49.6%. That means close to 50% of the data we have has a problem with quality, which is something huge.

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Isabel da Rosa: So, our proposal and the basic core proposal of the study is about data governance. And Chris, if you can move to the next slide, please.

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Isabel da Rosa: What we have been proposing and is being discussed for a long time is to set up a governance structure around public procurement data.

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Isabel da Rosa: Which is not unusual. I mean, data governance is a very old topic in the digital world, but for public procurement, the trick here is we need to govern this together.

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Isabel da Rosa: So, basically, the governance structure that we are proposing is a collaborative structure with the presence of the Member States and the bodies of the Commission that are in charge of governing public procurement.

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Isabel da Rosa: where we can take decisions in real time. That means that this proposal goes a little bit far from the traditional way of governing public procurement, where decisions are taken

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Isabel da Rosa: Into the legal or translated into the legal acts.

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Isabel da Rosa: And it takes a lot of time to change reality when we found some problems. The idea of this data governance structure is that we can deal with the problems together and take decisions, whatever they are, to try to solve data quality problems.

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Isabel da Rosa: Just to highlight that data quality problem means we don't know what is happening in public procurement. We have a sort of idea, but we really don't know. If we don't have reliable data, we will never be able to take decisions in terms of changing even the legal framework.

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Isabel da Rosa: To understand what makes sense.

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Isabel da Rosa: Another very important point about these

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Isabel da Rosa: Data governance framework that we are proposing is member states should do something similar.

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Isabel da Rosa: In fact, data governance is not something that needs to work only at European level. Member states should implement their own governance structure or their own governance frameworks for public procurement, because the problems, they start really early at the member state level, at the contracting authority level.

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Isabel da Rosa: Next slide, please.

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Isabel da Rosa: This is something that we emphasized a lot in the study, together with several and concrete proposals. I would say that the second most important proposal from the study is also about solving a problem that we all feel in our skin for a long time, that is unique identifiers.

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Isabel da Rosa: So, in Europe, for example, contracting authorities are identified by different codes.

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Isabel da Rosa: Some member states, they use business registers, some member states use DVAT number, and so on. There's a long list. And also, this is not only about understanding who participates in public procurement from the side of the buyer, or the side of the seller, or the participant.

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Isabel da Rosa: But also, how to link the different pieces of information from the life cycle, something that Mark just addressed in his presentation, because if we don't address the life cycle from the information that is publicly available, we cannot really understand what happened with that specific procedure.

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Isabel da Rosa: In the slide, we also have a set of proposals that were made, and one of the, I would say, important proposals is that the information in the Public Procurement Data Space to become mandatory related to the information that is publicly available.

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Isabel da Rosa: That means that everything that is available in the Member States, as a notice, or in the future, as Marc was saying, as a summary. should be in the Public Procurement Data Space.

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Isabel da Rosa: The only difference is, in our study, we made a clear difference between what is public data and what is transactional data. So, basically, our recommendation was very much on the data that is publicly available to be centralized in one single instrument.

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Isabel da Rosa: The good point about the Public Procurement Data Space is we have information above and below the thresholds. That means that we know what works and how it works under the European directives, and we also know what works and how it works under the national law.

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Isabel da Rosa: When it is regulated, of course.

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Isabel da Rosa: And you can see a lot of proposals, they are very detailed, very specific.

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Isabel da Rosa: I would recommend you to look at the study if you are interested, and I will give the floor to Tunde to speak about what were our topics from the legal side, and also from the roadmap. Thank you.

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Tünde Tátrai: Thank you very much, Isabel. Yes, we all of us know that at the same time, this must also be incorporated into the regulatory framework, so we somehow have to find a place in the proposal of all the priorities. So the priorities build on one another.

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Tünde Tátrai: Let's start with the establishment of the governance committee in the primary law, which would be very important. Of course, the details could be somewhere else, but it was our original idea, as Isabel just mentioned.

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Tünde Tátrai: The next is strengthening the Member States' data integrity obligations. As we saw in our previous study, it's far from being perfect.

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Tünde Tátrai: It's really not easy to identify, as Isabel mentioned, contracting authorities and bidders, and let's not forget that this also requires that both bidders and contracting authorities be clearly identified, and such identification

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Tünde Tátrai: Olga Olga, also presupposes that all parties involved register and keep their information up to date.

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Tünde Tátrai: And sometimes we have to say that regulation is not enough for this, because it's not just a decision to be part of a database, but it needs a lot of activity from the stakeholders' perspective.

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Tünde Tátrai: The next is enable EU-level decisions on interoperability and identifiers. I do not want to forget to mention that in our first study, we found that, let's say the.

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Tünde Tátrai: The false declaration and a lot of missing information.

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Tünde Tátrai: cause a lot of problems when having a look at any kind of publication, and of course, it affects validation activity of any of the service providers in public procurement. So, this is the next priority in terms of which regulation is not enough. Of course, it

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Tünde Tátrai: It really requires activity from stakeholders.

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Tünde Tátrai: The definition of Tenders Electronic Daily and the data space, and we suggested a co-publishing, innovative co-publishing space is necessary. We were thinking about the obligation for joining the Power Procurement data space.

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Tünde Tátrai: And right now, it is written in the proposal.

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Tünde Tátrai: And the proposal to the next step, based on our suggestion, it is the national data spaces, because we were thinking about the development of national indicator system, national data spaces, which data spaces are much more customized, and of course, are able to support

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Tünde Tátrai: policy-making decisions in all the member states.

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Tünde Tátrai: And last but not least, of course, setting an explicit principle for ethical and trustworthy use of AI. Of course, we can say that this is not the role of a Public Procurement Regulation, but we do think that we need.

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Tünde Tátrai: within the capacity building and the professionalization of Power Procurement to deal much more with AI, and somehow we have to incorporate it into a regulation.

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Tünde Tátrai: So, our study purpose is a pragmatic sequence, you know, stand-up governance structures, identifiers, strengthen the publication chain, scale the PPDS, and evolve national data spaces. and institutionalized feedback and capacity building. So together, these…

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Tünde Tátrai: This turned digitalization from a technology project into governance-led transformation, so in this way, we were planning to support the competitiveness through data, as mentioned by Marc previously.

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Gabriella Racca: Great. So we pass to Pedro Hotel.

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Pedro Telles: Thank you very much, Gabriella. I'm going to start by referring to the previous

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Pedro Telles: Previous presentation and, and say that, I'm glad to see that Mark, Mark,

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Pedro Telles: Marc now agrees with my view about the limitations on notices as a way to collect recruitment data, so I'm very happy to see that we're now in the same page on that one. So.

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Pedro Telles: About my presentation, I was tasked with doing something slightly different, because Chris let me know that there will be a lot of people from outside of the EU.

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Pedro Telles: So I said, okay, right, I'm gonna go first. I'm gonna try and give you a very short, brief introduction about how your law works when it comes down to legislative instruments. So, next slide, please.

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Pedro Telles: So at T-level, we have two main ways of doing secondary legislation.

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Pedro Telles: One is the directives, the other ones are regulations. They can be used interchangeably depending on how the EU institutions think, which should be an area of the law should be regulated.

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Pedro Telles: But they work very differently. So, a regulation follows more… more or more clearly the structure that you'd expect a law to follow. It is directly applicable all across the EU, so everyone that is subject to the scope of that regulation, you will have to comply with it, whether it likes it or not. That's more or less how it works.

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Pedro Telles: So you can see that on a column on the right just a very brief indication of a of a regulation.

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Pedro Telles: A directive, on the other hand, is something very different, which is, I think, more of a… more for origin in international law and trying to get in the…

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Pedro Telles: member states or countries to work a little bit together, in a way that they're not necessarily wanting to at the start. So, what the directive does is instead of, being directly applicable and containing direct commands for everyone to follow.

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Pedro Telles: What it does is that it has objectives and commands that are directed to the member states. It's then the member states which have to take those, those commands, the legal obligations, and implement them into national law. So, we have this buffer in between the directive and the…

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Pedro Telles: the people in the field that are going to be subject to those rules, that is mediated by national law. So, this implementation by national law, what it leads to in general is that it can only generate at most

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Pedro Telles: A degree of harmonization and I say a degree of harmonization because depending on how detailed the directive is or prescriptive it is.

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Pedro Telles: That, harmonization might be actually

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Pedro Telles: not much in practice achievable. So we end up with a legal regime that looks, at the surface level, identical across the member states, and then in reality, when you start drilling down, you start seeing the differences from member state A to member state B.

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Pedro Telles: which has the added effect that underneath this implementation, we then have at the national level.

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Pedro Telles: The practitioners, being the lawyers, the judges, they will going to be interfacing mostly with the national law without really paying much attention to what happens at your level. So those are the differences between, in a nutshell, between directives and regulations.

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Pedro Telles: Next slide, please.

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Pedro Telles: We can see here my attempt to systematize how EU Public Procurement has been regulated since 1971. And you can see here with the different colors that the EU and before that the European Economic Community, European Economic Community, they have regulated Public Procurement over the last 50 years via successive waves of directives.

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Pedro Telles: These directives are, as time goes on, more prescriptive, more detailed, they cover more areas, more sectors, more areas, and also they tend to include more rules about what should be done, how, and by whom.

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Pedro Telles: So you can see here, I think, four main waves of directives from 1971 to 2014.

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Pedro Telles: And what has happened with these directives is that they have followed pretty much on the path. Each new wave of directives follows in the path of the previous wave. So every new wave of directives goes a little bit further, a little bit in more detail, but more or less in the same direction of travel of what was achieved before.

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Pedro Telles: So in an area that is being regulated and it's working well, so that is good because you're just improving your regulation or regulatory environment that is working well. But that's not exactly the case with what happened in the directives. Next slide, please.

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Pedro Telles: So, if we look at the main objective of the directives, which is to achieve an internal market or single market within the EU,

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Pedro Telles: One of the metrics we use, the one that is more usually used to check the success of the directives in achieving an internal market, is the percentage of direct cross-border procurement, be it on the percentage of contracts or the value of the contracts that are won by firms that are based in other member states. And you can see here that according to some of the data that I could find in the 1960s, it was 1% to 2% of contracts.

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Pedro Telles: Obviously, we're talking about the European Economic Community, which at the time only had six members. And in the 2010s, when we had already 27 or 28 member states, we have a percentage of contracts being won by foreign firms that it's between 2 and 5%. It depends on the study that you look at.

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Pedro Telles: But we don't see, really, here, a step change that is compatible with a legal system that is working well, and a regulatory environment that is working well, and it just needs a, you know, a small nip and tuck, or small improvements here to just keep on going and be adapted to the… to the change in this, in the…

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Pedro Telles: the changes of the times. Next slide, please.

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Pedro Telles: So, it is unsurprising that

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Pedro Telles: at EU level, even though you may start by seeing a certain area of the law being regulated in the directive, you may see that the EU institutions conclude in the future, they conclude that the directive no longer is suitable to achieve the objectives of that regulatory text. So.

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Pedro Telles: We have quite a few examples over the last 15 years where we've seen a progressive transition of areas of the law that are being regulated by directives that are now regulated by regulations. So, we have the most obvious example, which is the one you see in the slides, which is data protection.

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Pedro Telles: You look at data protection is now regulated with the GDPR, General Data Protection Regulation, which succeeded a directive from the 1990s.

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Pedro Telles: Now, the actual substantive part of the GDPR is very similar to what we had in the directive of the 90s, but

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Pedro Telles: The changes it introduced in terms of the enforcement, in terms of the recognition of the importance of data protection as a fundamental right, that make all the difference in terms of how data protection today is seen all across the EU. And it's very much seen as

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Pedro Telles: An issue that needs to be.

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Pedro Telles: tackled correctly and competently, both by private sector, but also by public sector. But it's not only data protection that has gone through this, this change on regulatory instrument. We also have the medical devices industry, we also have anti-money laundering rules, we also have

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Pedro Telles: There are other… there are other ones in finance, in the finance services that are evading me, but we have a number of areas of the law that were originally regulated by directives, and now

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Pedro Telles: The institutions have accepted that if we really want to achieve those goals that require legislative text at your level, we need to use a regulation. Next slide, please.

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Pedro Telles: So what are the benefits of this transition from a directive to regulation? In my view, in connection with the area that we're talking about, Public Procurement, I think that it opens up a new regulatory equilibrium.

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Pedro Telles: It forces certain discussions and certain decisions to be made at EU level, whereas before, that lack of agreement could be patched up with the text that was unclear, and then sent down for the member states to solve on a practical basis.

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Pedro Telles: that is the first advantage. The second one is that some topics actually require regulation. I mean, there's certain areas of the law that are not… there's not alternative… an alternative choice between a directive or regulation. So when you're looking at topics that are covered

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Pedro Telles: by the common commercial policy of the Union, like what you see now with European preference, that requires a regulation that is

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Pedro Telles: mandated in the treaties, so it has to be done via regulation, either this one, the PPA, or something else, or another one, but it has to be done by a regulation. Also, from a practical perspective, if you look at the previous presentation.

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Pedro Telles: Many of the suggestions and the changes that are now being proposed, and I agree with them in the PPA regarding the digital infrastructure, they are only possible if we use the regulation to regulate them. Otherwise.

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Pedro Telles: We're going to be maintaining a degree of harmonization and differences between the member states on how they decide to run electronic procurement in their systems.

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Pedro Telles: Then, just to conclude briefly, we… with the regulation, we're gonna, expectedly, we should have a standardization of the rules, but also of the practices and the practical solutions. One of the problems I think we have at the moment is that

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Pedro Telles: Each member state and each community of practitioners in each member state is solving the same problem.

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Pedro Telles: 27 times.

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Pedro Telles: But they're just solving it slightly differently because they're using the national law, which is slightly different. And we don't communicate very well across borders in public procurement in that regard. So this is very different from what I observed in data protection, where the change from a directive to regulation really forced the discussion to be done at EU level and EU-wide all across the member states, because we now have

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Pedro Telles: in data protection, the exact same problem, because it's the exact same regulation, and the exact same judgments from the Court of Justice that we need to comply with. So, I think that there's a number of, benefits here that a regulation brings that a directive would not be able to.

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Pedro Telles: And, in fact, if we were to do another run of directive, we'll keep on going down the same path as we've done before, and I think achieve the same goals. So I think that's the last slide I have. The last one is just a thank you slide.

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Pedro Telles: Yeah. Just one final note. I'm commenting with my good friend Marko Turudic, which is also here today, on the Draft Public Recruitment Act. We're looking at it one entry a week, and we started with European preferences, which I think might be of interest to the audience.

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Gabriella Racca: Great, thank you very much. And we will see what will happen and how much room will be left to the regulation and to the member states.

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Gabriella Racca: So, John Michelbano on competitive procedure.

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Gabriella Racca: Tell us something about.

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Gian Luigi Albano: Thank you, Gabriella, and this is gonna be a very, very short discussion about one of the most used words during every single time we have to come up with a new idea about directives or regulation, which is

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Gian Luigi Albano: the extent to which the overall… the overarching regulatory system is flexible enough, and flexibility is one of the mantras, and I'm gonna take a very different perspective. I'm gonna take perspective

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Gian Luigi Albano: of an economy, since this is an issue which is very much debated in economic theory, what's the advantage and the drawbacks of flexibility? And so I want to put on the table, on a virtual table today, basically two main ideas. One is that, you know, in order to talk about flexibility, we should have a method theory of flexibility.

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Gian Luigi Albano: And in fact, we don't have it. So what's the meaning of flexibility? It's very hard to be a common understanding or common agreement. So when we, you know, if you have a hundred thousand more or less administrative professors discussing about this word with possibly 10,000 different…

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Gian Luigi Albano: meanings, it's very hard to converge to a sort of common agreement. Secondly, is suppose that we look for a time being, we keep our eyes on the current directive, and there are

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Gian Luigi Albano: margin, there is room for flexibility, and we know that. You know, 15 years ago.

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Gian Luigi Albano: during the discussion for the 2014 regulation, there was this idea that flexibility would be to enlarge the number of procedures, give public buyers as many procedures as possible. We ended up with a thousand different procedures, I mean, not the thousand, but many different procedures, and then to find out that actually that was not the way, that that made

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Gian Luigi Albano: Public Procurement experts even more confused they used to be.

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Gian Luigi Albano: But there is still… there is still… there is still room for flexibility. And so, one way of addressing whether, actually, we are going towards a possibly good direction is to see to what extent was that flexibility used. And I mean, if you look backwards, and there are many reports, many of the co-panelists here.

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Gian Luigi Albano: have profusely written on the, in a report by European Court of Auditors.

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Gian Luigi Albano: reports on state of public procurement markets in Europe, and you can see immediately that even the Commission was very blunt in saying, hey, public procurement

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Gian Luigi Albano: authorities, you know, they don't use the flexibilities they're allowed to use. You know, they, for instance, you know, work criteria, you know, low price rather than, you know, best value for money. You know, if you look at data, the very simple and robust data that we have on that, you know.

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Gian Luigi Albano: contracting authorities don't… didn't seem to, you know, look for, you know, they stick to, in most cases, to low-price competition. So the point is, if this is our heritage, you know, in the recent past.

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Gian Luigi Albano: you know, what is the way… the way forward? So let me look very simply. So this is one starting observation. The second observation is about introduce, first of all, reducing the number of procedures and introducing more negotiation-like features into the system. And it's very interesting, because, you know, one could say that this view procedure, and in a way.

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Gian Luigi Albano: Makes sort of a hybrid, can I have the next slide, please?

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Gian Luigi Albano: make a sort of hybrid system between negotiation and OPERA procedure may remind us of practices in both the US, you know, federal system and the UK Public Procurement Act. Now, what I've tried to do in these.

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Gian Luigi Albano: very, I mean, hopefully, simple, table is to gather all the ideas to emphasize that, in fact.

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Gian Luigi Albano: The solution that has been taken or adopted in the current draft of the regulation doesn't seem to be very much in the spirit.

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Gian Luigi Albano: of, either the US, you know, case and the UK case. Why? Because you can introduce, you know, flexibility in this sort of hybrid system in a variety of ways, and it's very hard to understand which way is gonna turn out to be, you know, the most effective one. Let me mention this thing, which I think is very interesting. If you look from.

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Gian Luigi Albano: I would say, a game theoretical perspective, you know, the kind of toolbox I normally use. You know, in the EU, the idea seems to be

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Gian Luigi Albano: that some very important rules of the game, like the award career, the waiting system, they have to be fixed. But there is some sort of discretion or flexibility.

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Gian Luigi Albano: in the way you're gonna handle this potentially multi-stage interaction with the market, because at any point in time, you can stop it, and you can actually award by using that last stage as if it were a standard open procedure. Now, if you look at what happens in the US and UK, this is not

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Gian Luigi Albano: the case. So, one point…

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Gian Luigi Albano: That to me is important because I spend most of my time not writing papers, unfortunately, but working in a big contracting authorities, which is one of the biggest central authorities

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Gian Luigi Albano: purchasing bodies in Europe is to understand that as soon as you start introducing all these, you know, the possibility of changing some of the rules of the game, why you're playing the game, you have to keep into, you have to anticipate the way the market is going to react. So as Professor Racca was emphasizing at the very beginning.

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Gian Luigi Albano: of this talk. There is an issue about if there is some sort of, to some extent, a lack of competence, at least at some levels.

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Gian Luigi Albano: of contracting authorities that basically has induced those contractors or not to use appropriately, you know, quality and price in the past, you know, 12 years.

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Gian Luigi Albano: What's going to happen when we add even more layers of flexibility to that? So the easy question would be, train them more intensely or 24 hours a day, which is not an answer, by the way, because we know that things need to be done.

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Gian Luigi Albano: even in the short term. To me, there is a problem which has been actually emphasized by one of the participants in the chat. It's a water belt competition.

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Gian Luigi Albano: So what about, what is going to be the likely reaction of the market? If competition is meant to be some sort of prediction about the number of bidders, you know, participating in a procedure, well, this is not, we don't know yet. We don't know to what extent these theory or these application of a theory of flexibility is going to have in terms of market participation.

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Gian Luigi Albano: et cetera, et cetera. So I think if I may have the last slide, please.

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Gian Luigi Albano: I think that the one way of taking this is to say, look, while more flexibility is a principle, okay, provided that that flexibility addresses the sort of the missing points or the holes into the system. And it's not clear, especially given the fact that negotiation or negotiation-like procedures in the private sector.

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Gian Luigi Albano: They're used because there is a very longstanding, a very robust way of assessing the performance of a procurement system. So it turns, you know, introducing additional layers will require to be even more sophisticated.

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Gian Luigi Albano: in assessing the performance of the system, assessing the performance of the contracting authorities. And so this would require inevitably, as Tunde and Isabel were saying, a more structured and more, I would say, comprehensive way of approaching information gathering. But I think it would require even having a sort of a rationale for assessing performance.

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Gian Luigi Albano: Which will become inevitably more multifaceted, because there will be more things there in principle.

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Gian Luigi Albano: feasible and available to a contracting authority. So, new problems, new possibilities, so a lot of work, I think, for lawyers, but even for economists, and so thank you very much for having me.

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Gian Luigi Albano: Here. Thank you.

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Gabriella Racca: Thank you. Thank you very much, Gian Luigi, and for Loyal, there will be absolutely a lot of work. So, let's pass the floor to Marco and Roberto for the last topic on strategic autonomy. Please, the floor is yours.

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Marko Turudić: Hi, it's a pleasure to be here, and it's a pleasure to share this presentation with Roberto. I'm going to start with the first slide, and then Roberto is going to continue, and then we're going to switch back and forth a bit.

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Marko Turudić: So, in general, for a supplier bidding across borders, right, two questions come first, or should come first.

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Marko Turudić: Am I allowed to compete? And can I challenge an unfair decision? So my concern here is that this proposal, the Public Procurement Act proposal, leaves too much uncertainty about both.

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Marko Turudić: So first, we need to understand what covered means. A supplier from outside of the EU is covered when an international agreement protects its access to the particular contract.

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Marko Turudić: These agreements include, of course, the WTO GPA, the standard bilateral free trade agreements with public procurement chapters between EU and other third countries. And protection, of course, depends on who is buying, what are they buying.

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Marko Turudić: and the contracts value coverages, right? So, the EU also has tools.

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Marko Turudić: Addressing unequal market access, foreign subsidies, and economic pressure or economic coercion, the anti-coercion instrument.

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Marko Turudić: But these do not settle every question about suppliers without treaty protection.

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Marko Turudić: In the famous Colin and Chindau judgments of the European Court, the European Court of Justice left individual buyers to decide whether these or those suppliers could participate, where no EU measure settles the issue.

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Marko Turudić: Admission does not give them the protections of the EU Public Procurement Directives or National Procurement Legislation transposing those directives.

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Marko Turudić: So, I'd like to concentrate on a recital of the new Public Procurement Act proposal. So, Recital 33 builds this approach into the proposal.

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Marko Turudić: It makes Colin and Chindao principles of the new Public Procurement Act. Maybe I'm overreaching here, but this really looks to me like a new principle, and carries over into the future all of the problems, those judgments. So, contracting authority discretion, questionable stance on remedies.

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Marko Turudić: All of these problems that these judgments bring. So this would be my main overarching criticism of the European preference part of the PPA proposal.

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Marko Turudić: The court was dealing.

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Marko Turudić: when issuing Pulling and Chinda with a gap in EU legislation.

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Marko Turudić: And now the legislature, during the trialogue, has an opportunity to fill that gap with clear common rules.

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Marko Turudić: Instead of this, in this proposal, it risks making uncertainty a lasting part of the system. So, next slide, please, and Roberto will continue.

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Roberto Caranta: Okay, thank you, Marco and everyone. I think that this topic must be put in context.

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Roberto Caranta: This is part of an important revolution.

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Roberto Caranta: in public procurement at European level.

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Roberto Caranta: Oh!

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Roberto Caranta: Okay, for the past 30 years, there was, for maybe 40, there was this idea that, okay, public procurement just needs to be about buying.

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Roberto Caranta: This is not the approach in public procurement in this proposal. The idea is that you have

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Roberto Caranta: EY, the general interest that must be taken into account.

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Roberto Caranta: And this is, the environment, climate change is the social aspect, but is also the…

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Roberto Caranta: Union safety, security, resilience and economic security.

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Roberto Caranta: There is this idea that the world has changed.

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Roberto Caranta: It has become a more dangerous place.

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Roberto Caranta: And this must be reflected in our approach.

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Roberto Caranta: Public Procurement. Next one, please.

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Marko Turudić: Okay, I'll take it from Roberto. So…

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Marko Turudić: Article 73 of the proposal allows buyers to limit participation, reject a bid during the procedure. And this is really important. I'm going to delve into this in a couple of minutes.

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Marko Turudić: Require EU or covered goods, services, and works, and favor eligible bids through price or score adjustments. So, these choices can also affect subcontractors.

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Marko Turudić: What particularly concerns me is rejection at any time during the procedure. So the proposal expressly requires advance notice for other types of European preference.

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Marko Turudić: Yet leaves this safeguard unclear for this particular rejection.

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Marko Turudić: So, why is this important? Rule of law, of course, but preparing a bid costs time and money, and I think, and I believe suppliers need to know

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Marko Turudić: The conditions of the game or the rules of the game before they invest their time and resources into potentially participating in the procedure.

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Marko Turudić: But I'd like to go back to this rejection. This is Article 73, paragraph 1.b of the PPA. To quote it, "Public buyers may reject the tender in the course of a procedure.

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Marko Turudić: So a logical reading, at least to me, a logical reading of this provision leads to the conclusion that a contracting authority may decide to reject a tender from only one of the participating non-covered economic operators.

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Marko Turudić: leaving the rest in. So, imagine a situation where you have two Chinese and two Indian economic operators that have submitted tenders.

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Marko Turudić: So the contracting authority may decide mid-procedure or at the end of the procedure to exclude them all — this is the first instance — or to reject only the two Chinese tenders.

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Marko Turudić: leaving the two Indians in, or to reject just one of the two Chinese tenders and leave the Indian ones in. So, just to cherry-pick and exclude one of those four third-country economic operators. So, if I'm reading this correctly.

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Marko Turudić: This is an incredible amount of discretion given to contracting authorities. So this layered approach to economic operators from different non-covered countries and even to economic operators from the same non-covered country goes beyond even the discretion allowed by the court in Pullin and Chinda.

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Marko Turudić: So, future commission rules called delegated acts could bring greater consistency.

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Marko Turudić: Article 75 allows the Commission to make EU preference mandatory for non-covered suppliers and supplies. Article 72 separately allows it to remove covered status in specified circumstances, and both powers must respect the EU's international commitments.

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Marko Turudić: Or there are certain instances where the Commission might not even respect those.

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Marko Turudić: But these rules first need to be prepared and justified if Commission is going to apply delegated acts under Article 141. Once an act is adopted and notified to the Parliament at Council, representing national governments have two months to object.

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Marko Turudić: Either institution can extend that period by another 2 months, and earlier clearance is possible, and an objection can block this delegated act. So…

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Marko Turudić: With preparation followed by this review, bringing these rules into operation will most likely take a while, and buyers and bidders may therefore face a long period of uncertainty before those common and obligatory rules take effect.

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Marko Turudić: Meanwhile, whenever no binding EU rules settles some of these questions, individual contracting authorities will retain this substantial level of discretion. Okay, Roberto's slide next, please.

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Roberto Caranta: Thank… thank you, Marco. Oh, sorry, everyone, for…

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Roberto Caranta: The mishap? Well, you might believe that.

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Roberto Caranta: This will be relevant maybe in 2029, 2030.

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Roberto Caranta: After the Commission has adopted any, let's say, implementing legislation changing the picture.

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Roberto Caranta: There is one part that… Basically.

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Roberto Caranta: It will be… Come into force immediately, I would say also before.

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Roberto Caranta: the regulation, and this is concerning.

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Roberto Caranta: We have already discussed the important IT structure.

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Roberto Caranta: The National Procurement Data Space.

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Roberto Caranta: eProcurement service provider. This is really the core.

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Roberto Caranta: of the reform.

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Roberto Caranta: And a buying European is already strongly embedded in the proposal.

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Roberto Caranta: For both aspects, e-procurement and national procurement data space, the message is very, very clear.

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Roberto Caranta: only for those companies established in the EU.

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Roberto Caranta: All the wider are including Norway.

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Roberto Caranta: and Lichtenstein.

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Roberto Caranta: Only for companies that are directed.

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Roberto Caranta: From these countries, from people coming from these countries, and only.

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Roberto Caranta: Data will have only to be stored.

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Roberto Caranta: in this country. This is part of the idea of strategic autonomy, resilience, and so on and so forth. As it was already indicated, these National Procurement Data Spaces are supposed to include massive, really massive data.

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Roberto Caranta: From very sensitive sources, like criminal records.

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Roberto Caranta: And so on. The idea is that while this is developed, It must be developed within.

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Roberto Caranta: the EU. Well, economic space by

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Roberto Caranta: company or companies owned and controlled.

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Roberto Caranta: So, this part, let's say, the IT infrastructure, the art of the reform, is firmly anchored into the EU.

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Roberto Caranta: Thank you a lot for having me, and sorry for the video the first time.

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Gabriella Racca: Thank you very much for very slow and I'm so happy that you shared the idea of this is the core part of the reform of the direct please.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: So Gary, I apologize to the audience. We've gone over time, so I'm going to have to just leap to one question here. And for questions, I'm going to be collecting questions from the chat, and I'm going to be putting them to the panelists.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: And I've asked them for the responses, and I'll go ahead and post the responses on the chat and the, on the program page in the next day or so. So thanks, everyone, for their patience. And because we have a lot of teachers here, I want to ask a teacher's question. What impact will the new regulation have

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: on how public procurement is taught, and how you teach public procurement. John Luigi, do you want to lead us off?

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Gian Luigi Albano: The most provocative question in the last 3 months.

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Gian Luigi Albano: Well, the… I mean, the easy answer… I mean, I have a vested interest in that, so I have to…

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Gian Luigi Albano: immediately disclose them. But let's say that, you know, we go through the rationales. I mean, the more… the more room for playing you have, the more you can change the rules of the game while you play the game.

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Gian Luigi Albano: Well, I guess the more will be important to, you know, ask for people, you know, who are the sort of experts in that, how to set a game, how to play a game, anticipate, move, etc. I mean, unfortunately, you know, they're not… I mean, in the past 15 years, I've seen more economies involved in that.

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Gian Luigi Albano: But known to the extent to which it would have been desirable, especially for students.

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Gian Luigi Albano: And I, you know, private lawyers who, who have normally a lot of experience in, sort of negotiations in the private sector will be, to me, would be the ideal candidates

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Gian Luigi Albano: to join the crew and contribute to the teaching. There will be less and less, to my understanding, emphasis in the way we think about pathologies and all these, kind of.

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Gian Luigi Albano: you know, low-driven lectures on, we observe this pathology here and that, and we spend days in understanding the way pathologies were, you know, arose. There would be a lot more discussion about

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Gian Luigi Albano: new possibilities. So, to this extent, I mean, there is a much more constructive way of, you know, of, you know, figuring out how Procurement will be carried out in the future. So, in this sense, I'm very optimistic, because there will be a lot of things to do.

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Gian Luigi Albano: But to me, going back to what Isabel and Tunde said, I mean, the crucial point will be information gathering and having at least minimal quality in terms of information throughout Europe so that we can really assess the way things get done.

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Gian Luigi Albano: Thank you, Chris.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Thank you very much, Young Luigi. Gabriella, how do you think it'll affect your teaching?

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Gabriella Racca: Yes, I think we have to teach the forthcoming way of procuring. So, platforms, so the artificial intelligence instruments to elaborate data. So I think it will change radically, also from the legal point of view. We have to share teaching with other experts, and

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Gabriella Racca: think about how to simplify the process and the award procedure through platform.

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Gabriella Racca: in order to teach a new way of procurement, not the old way. So that's why I think the two lines of evolution should go in parallel, but looking always forward to artificial intelligence and Agentic Procurement at what we are discussing in our next further book with you, Chris.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Thank you. Tunde?

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Tünde Tátrai: Well, just very briefly, one thing is certain that there will be enormous demand for training programs, whether university level or vocational in a market. So, this is good for both the market and the academy, I think.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Thank you. Marco?

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Marko Turudić: Sorry, yeah, I completely agree with Tunde. I think there's going to be a really big demand, especially for professional courses, to bring closer all of these new developments to the procurement professionals.

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Marko Turudić: But also, I think in our undergraduate and graduate courses, I think this will go a long way to

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Marko Turudić: bring closer the case law of the Court of Justice to students and practitioners alike, because now we are losing the… another layer of complexity, not completely, but at least for… For a certain extent.

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Marko Turudić: of national law when dealing with the same issues across all member states.

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Marko Turudić: So maybe I see it from a practical standpoint that we are maybe, at least in Croatia, concentrating more and more on national practice, national case law. Maybe this will help us to concentrate more on the Court of Justice case law.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Pretty good. Roberto?

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Roberto Caranta: Well, building on what Marco was saying, actually, I think the big one of the big new things in the regulation proposal is that you focus on formation.

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Roberto Caranta: training information. So this is for students, but I think it's even more important.

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Roberto Caranta: To teach those involved in the procurement profession.

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Roberto Caranta: And I mean buyers, but not just being buyers.

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Roberto Caranta: For instance, just a stupid example, why we don't have much

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Roberto Caranta: Quality buying is a lot of lowest price in many countries, in many new countries. The answer is very, very easy. It is fear of being accused of corruption and how court of auditors look.

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Roberto Caranta: into how you buy. And so, training will have to be extended to these people. It is a new dance.

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Roberto Caranta: And a very…

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Roberto Caranta: person involved in any capacity will have to be involved. Of course, this may be for universities, it may be for more institutional approach led by the European Commission.

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Roberto Caranta: And of course, for us lawyers, Albano is a bit different, but including the, let's say, IT part, we needed to be able, rather than just being advertising the new world.

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Roberto Caranta: To identify and address the tough legal questions.

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Roberto Caranta: It's not just about saying, oh, this is the revolution. What are the legal issues behind these approaches?

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Roberto Caranta: Thank you a lot.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Thank you, Roberto. Pedro?

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Pedro Telles: Yeah, I mean, I'm gonna be a little bit more prosaic than that. I hope that it convinces my colleagues to allow Public Procurement to be taught in English at CBS instead of just Danish.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Thank you, Petra. Isabel.

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Isabel da Rosa: Well, some final words on my side about all of these. As already mentioned, professionalization is a key cornerstone of everything that is going to happen in the future.

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Isabel da Rosa: And I really hope that this time goes in a different way than have been happening the last years, because the last directives are from 2014. They enter into force 2016.

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Isabel da Rosa: And we are still setting up professionalization frameworks, we are still investing today.

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Isabel da Rosa: In training and giving the right tools to people to build capacity, but they had to work in public procurement all these years, and has not been solving the problems that were addressed in the current law or the current legal framework.

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Isabel da Rosa: I really hope that this time we can do it in a different way. We start by this, because.

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Isabel da Rosa: Due to my work, I've been in touch a lot with contracting authorities, and they feel that everything is very heavy currently in public procurement. The demand is very high in terms of knowledge.

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Isabel da Rosa: In terms of what you want to do, in terms of what you need to understand.

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Isabel da Rosa: And we need to give them some help. We cannot leave professionalization to the future. We need to start now, even if the law is not finalized, or the legal framework is not finalized. This is, for me, a priority, regardless all the digital tools, all the AI.

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Isabel da Rosa: We need to give a hand to public procurement is a hard job. That's my final word.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Thank you very much, Isabel. Just my closing observation is more and more of our teaching here in the United States for both for lawyers and for procurement professionals.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: is geared towards AI. So, for example, historically, it would take 5 to 10 hours to produce a bid challenge document. Now it can be produced in 20 minutes, but it has to be reviewed by someone with an enormous amount of subject matter expertise.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: Logically, in five or 10 years, a lawyer base here in the United States will be able to prepare a bid challenge for Croatia, Marco, for example.

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: But that lawyer needs to understand the context, the very complex transnational context, which is why networks like we've had here, dialogues like we've had here, is such an important part, really why we've established this cooperative network of professors, so that we can share

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Christopher Yukins / GW Law: our perspectives from different nations with our students from different nations so that they can work internationally. Thank you all very much. Have a good day. Bye-bye.

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Tünde Tátrai: Bye-bye, thank you.