In the master's thesis entitled Public procurement procedure and restriction of competition by bid rigging, the issue of concluding restrictive agreements between tenderers in public tenders is presented. Contracting entities which are obligated to conduct public procurement procedures must, in order to implement the principle of ensuring fair competition and economy, exclude from the procedure all non-independent offers which are the result of inadmissible collusion between tenderers. With the agreements, they exclude mutual competition and agree in advance which of them will be the most successful, and what the price will be in the winning tender. The latter results in higher prices, a decreasing quality of public procurement objects, and at the same time inhibits technological development. Such types of agreements are called bid rigging, or prikrojevanje ponudb in Slovenian, and the Public Agency of the Republic of Slovenia for the protection of competition is responsible for its detection and sanctioning. In order to successfully discover bid rigging, the contracting entities must know the characteristics of the branch, analyze the market, preserve documents from previous tenders and concretely examine the content of the submitted offers, in order to successfully identify clues. Strong cooperation between contracting authorities and the Agency is needed to ensure the flow of information, based on which, primarily, the tender is excluded from the specific procedure, and secondarily, a misdemeanor procedure is conducted before the Agency, which detects a possible restrictive agreement, and sanctions the involved companies and person responsible. The paper presented a critique of the case law of the Administrative Court and DKOM regarding the assessment of restrictive agreements by objective or effect, which imposes on the Agency and contracting authorities the burden of assessing the effects of agreements on competition. The case law of the Court of Justice of the EU is clear, that for the cases of bid rigging, the nature of the infringement demonstrates a sufficient degree of harmfulness to competition in a given market. It is certainly true, however, that the contracting authority must allow the tenderer to declare and provide evidence of independence and reliability, and duly justify the decision on the inadmissibility of the tender.
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