PPA proposal commentary

Starting the commentary to the Public Procurement Act proposal

As announced last week on Linkedin, myself and Marko Turudic will be commenting the Public Procurement Act proposal. This will be done in a similar fashion to the work me and Albert Sanchez-Graells did with the transposition of Directive 2014/24/EU to England, Wales and Northern Ireland. That is to say, you can expect blogposts addressing the same topic landing on each of our blogs on the same day (hopefully!)

We will be going article by article (sometimes) or section by section where appropriate. I do not think we will cover the whole text but our aim is to touch on the meatier subjects that are a drawing interest and attention.

Instead of following the structure of the Public Procurement Act, we are instead choosing what to cover as we go along based on our perceptions of what is more important. We may also ask on Linkedin if there are particular areas of interest we should look at too.

The first topic of our joint endeavour is European Preference (Chapter 5) from articles 70-77. The first post is landing on Thursday morning and until mid-November we are doing one post a week. We will pick up the pace once I'm done with my teaching.

The Public Procurement Act proposal: mixing up simplification with flexibility

I had an interesting exchange last night on Bluesky about the Public Procurement Act proposal and its purported simplification. There I simply stated that 'simplification is yet to be seen.' My good friend Albert nailed it in the head on Linkedin: There is a difference between reducing the

Some data on Portuguese procurement from IMPIC's 2025 report

IMPIC published recently its yearly report on procurement activity in Portugal for 2025 and as usual it is full of interesting bits of information. Here are a few I thought worth bringing up. Bear in mind that the data is aggregated and not broken down between above and below thresholds.

Notes on the visit to the Commission and the draft Public Procurement Act proposal

I had the pleasure of visiting the Commission yesterday alongside a number of procurement colleagues to meet with the team working on the Procurement Act and the Executive Vice-President of the Commission, Stephane Sejournee. The meetings were held under Chatham House rules meaning that while we can talk about

The draft proposal for the Public Procurement Act has leaked

Linkedin (well, its procurement law niche) was on fire yesterday with the news that the draft proposal for the upcoming Public Procurement Act had leaked. The proverbial procurement cat is out of the Commission's bag just before the summer break and well in advance of the expected formal

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The Public Procurement Act proposal: mixing up simplification with flexibility

Some data on Portuguese procurement from IMPIC's 2025 report

Notes on the visit to the Commission and the draft Public Procurement Act proposal

The draft proposal for the Public Procurement Act has leaked