Chairman of The Office upheld decisions in cases of manipulated electronic drawings

The Chairman of the Office for the Protection of Competition (“the Office”), Petr Rafaj, upheld eight first-instance decisions in which the Office stated the violation of the Act on Public Contracts which consisted of non-transparent narrowing of the number of tenderers through electronic drawing device.

In some of the cases, the Chairman reduced sanctions which were imposed to following contracting entities: Povodí Vltavy, state enterprise, the town of Šternberk, the town of Kostelec nad Labem, Jihočeský kraj, Správa silnic Olomouckého kraje and the towns of Cítov and Svijany. The fines were modified to proportionally reflect similar circumstances of all these cases.

The Office initiated the administrative proceedings based on the complaint submitted by the Police of the Czech Republic who pointed out the possible manipulation when reducing the number of tenderers through an electronic drawing. In most of the cases, the companies KLERIS CZ or Inženýrské stavby Hradec Králové were hired to conduct a drawing. The laptop with installed drawing software running in the UNIFACE platform was used for a drawing.

According to the expert’s opinion which was made by the Police and available to the Office, the drawing device was not secured against the manipulation with drawing results. On the contrary, it was intentionally created in a manner that enables the result manipulation. The organisers of drawings could set which bidders will be selected by the system by using pre-set file with ID numbers of entities.

The laptop was modified to allow the performance of not manipulated demonstrative drawing that should have proved the fairness of the whole process to the tenderers. After the drawing, the pre-set file on which bases the results were displayed was automatically deleted.

The expert’s opinion clearly indicated that the drawing device was intentionally designed to manipulate and influence results of a drawing in order to prevent a random selection. Based on this fact, the Office stated that a drawing cannot be considered transparent in any of the cases.  In this situation, the investigation whether the manipulation of results was carried out also directly in award procedures in question or not was not necessary.

The contracting entities violated one of the main principles of public contracts awarding, the principle of transparency and by this conduct they could significantly affect the selection of the most suitable tender.

The process of the reduction of a number of tenderers by drawings was removed from the Act on Public Contracts because of its problematic nature and according to the provisions which entered into force on 1^st April 2012, the contracting authorities are not allowed to use it any more.

Contracting authority	Public contract	Imposed fine in CZK
Povodí Vltavy, state enterprise	Increase in capacity of Vltava riverbed in a cadastral area of Nové Ouholice and Veltrusy	230,000
Povodí Vltavy, state enterprise	Flood protection measures in the area of Svrčovec	100,000
A town of Šternberk	Construction works of streets Lhotská and Na Bažinách in Šternberk	160,000
A town of Kostelec nad Labem	Leisure centre Kostelec nad Labem	100,000
South Bohemian Region	Reconstruction of roads III/1508 and 15015, a through road in a town of Rapšach	100,000
Správa silnic Olomouckého kraje	Bridge, evidence number 44620-5, Střeň	100,000
A town of Cítov	Revitalization of  a social facility	90,000
A town of Svijany	Construction of a sewage system in Svijany	75,000