Ireland: ‘Bid-rigging’ is costing millions, warns chief of anti-cartel body

Isolde Goggin, chairperson of the Competition and Consumer Protection Commission, said the body – which is also prioritising the waste and motor sectors – is currently reliant on whistleblowers to detect wrongdoing in public procurement bids.

It is estimated that a rigged bid adds between 20pc and 30pc to public procurement costs.

“We’ve had various complaints over the years, and we’ve done various investigations, but we haven’t had a successful prosecution. We need to improve the data, the evidence base for what we’re looking at,” Goggin told the Sunday Independent.

“International experience would tell you that [public procurement] is something that tends to be very prone to cartel activity, and particularly to bid-rigging, where people decide: ‘Look, there’s six of us here in the market, if we all really compete we’re not necessarily all going to survive. Why don’t we just have a little gentleman’s agreement that this time you’ll get it, the next time you get it and so on’.

“If only 5pc of procurement processes were subject to bid-rigging, the extra cost to the Irish taxpayer would be in the region of €100m a year,” said Goggin, whose office has reviewed 74 allegations of competition law breaches between October 2014 and December last year.

The CCPC has written to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to make the case for a data analytics-based system, which would make it easier to track activity in the public procurement sector.

Full Content: Business Irish

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