This paper briefly reviews the need for the Proposed Concessions Directive and the opportunity of the proposal; explores the logic and main aspects of the Proposed Concessions Directive, particularly regarding its more ‘concession-specific' rules on their economic balance; and offers some...

This paper attempts a concise comparison of the rules applicable to the rejection of abnormally low and non-compliant tenders in a number of EU jurisdictions (namely, Denmark, France, Germany, Italy, Poland, Romania, Spain and the United Kingdom). In order to set the common ground for the...

This piece reflects on the role of public procurement regulation in the face of a situation generating an extremely urgent need for the public sector to buy additional supplies and equipment, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. Counterintuitively, at a time of heightened public expenditure, public...

This paper looks at public procurement and State aid rules as two examples of areas of EU economic law subjected to interpretative and enforcement difficulties due to the introduction, sometimes veiled, of subjective elements in their main prohibitions. The paper establishes parallels with other...

This paper aims to offer some reflections on the legal relevance of general principles of EU public procurement law after the adoption of the 2014 package of substantive Directives on public procurement. It focusses on the field of concession contracts because one of the explicit justifications...

This paper provides a critical assessment of the rules regarding the clarification, supplementation and correction of tenders in procedures for the award of public contracts regulated by the EU 2014 Public Procurement Package. It does so through a detailed assessment of the transposition of...

In this short paper, I reflect on the case study of the procurement of personal protective equipment (PPE) for the English NHS during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. I put forward two main claims. My first claim is that the UK Government not only was particularly ill-positioned to deal...

The recent ECJ Judgment in case C-124/10 P Commission v Électricité de France (EDF) has clarified an important point in EU State aid law that bears attention: the ‘private investor' test is not an exception, but the general test that the Commission must apply. This paper critically appraises...

This paper looks at how the EU public procurement rules have shown a tendency to permanently expand their scope of application, both within and outside the EU. Inside the EU, the expansion has primarily resulted from blurred coverage boundaries and a creeping application outside their explicit...

This chapter assesses the use of public procurement to enforce labour standards from a competition and State aid perspective, and concentrates on the establishment of contract compliance clauses under the rules of Article 26 of Directive 2004/18/EC and Article 70 of Directive 2014/24/EU and in...