No companies blacklisted from public tenders yet, two cases still under review

The Commercial Sanction Tribunal has so far not blacklisted any companies from public procurement. The only two companies who have been earmarked for blacklisting are still under review.

Three independent entities which fall under the remit of the Ministry for Finance yesterday published a report on the workings of the Public Contracts Review Board for the year 2016.

This is the fourth report being published by this board. The report combines the findings by the Department of Contracts, Public Contracts Review Board and the Commercial Sanction Tribunal.

Anthony Cassar, Chairman of the Review Board explained that they had found a lot of pending contracts related to the education and health sectors. Priorities were given to health and EU funding.

He said that the board has made a lot of progress in the last couple of years with the period between an appeal and sentencing being reduced from six weeks to 15 days. The board received an average of 130 appeals each year in the last three years. For the first time, the thick, twovolume report includes entire transcripts.

Cassar said that the company had the right to appeal for decisions over €12,000. This was recently reduced to €5,000. The appeals which were categorised as ‘frivolous’, went down from 60% to 15% in the period between 2014 and now.

The board had to review more than €109 million in tenders. Anthony Cachia said that the contracts department handled more than 135,000 tenders and public contracts.

Minister for Finance Edward Scicluna said that these three entities have a very important job as they handle tax payers’ money. Part of the €3 billion government investment goes to public procurement.

According to the report, the value of tenders issued amounted to more than €31 million in 2015. Both in 2015 and 2016, the percentage of appeals upheld amounted to an average of 40%. Some 60% of the appeals were rejected.