The aim of public procurement is to ensure effective and economic use of public funds as well as secure competition and guarantee equality among bidders. In order to achieve said goals, effective legal protection, including the possibility of compensation, must be regulated, in addition to the public procurement procedure. In the public procurement procedure, legal protection is primarily ensured in the pre-audit procedure before the client; in case a bidder's arguments are not accepted or a client remains silent, the matter can be pursued in the review procedure before the National Review Commission (hereinafter: NRC). The decision adopted by the NRC is legally binding. Until recently, the law did not foresee any ordinary or extraordinary appeals against such decision. The Act Amending the Legal Protection in Public Procurement Procedures Act (hereinafter: the Act), however, alters such arrangement, as it introduces the possibility of judicial protection against decisions adopted by the NRC in form of administrative proceedings. In this master’s thesis, titled Legal Protection against Decisions Adopted by National Review Commission, I first analyse the arrangement prior to the adoption of the amendment of the Act in Slovenia as well as the arrangement of legal protection in the public procurement procedure in some new EU member states. This is followed by a presentation of basic novelties related to legal protection and introduced by the amendment. In the second part of this master’s thesis, I present the possibilities for claiming compensation following an infringement of the law in the field of public procurement, and I raise a question about the extent of compensation in such cases. I advocate the view that, in some cases, the unselected bidder could be granted positive contract interest (foregone revenue) in addition to negative contract interest.
|
