Protection of the interests of the Customers in AMKU

Public procurement has existed in Ukraine since 2016, and during this time an unusually large number of tenders were held and contracts were signed with their direct executors. However, as practice shows, participants in public procurement quite often send complaints to the Antimonopoly Committee of Ukraine for various reasons, namely: contesting the conditions of the tender documentation, cancellation of tenders with special features, decisions taken by the tender customer, etc. For public procurement customers, all this creates problems that need to be solved in the legal field. This shows the relevance of consideration of this topic. And therefore, in this article, we will consider how it is possible to protect the interests of customers in the AMCU, while analyzing the current provisions of the normative legal acts of Ukraine.

Why are AMCU decisions not always fair?

First of all, it should be noted that the AMCU as an appeals body was created only with the sole purpose of providing the opportunity for participants in public procurement to appeal the decisions made by the tenderers, which is essentially necessary to ensure a mechanism of equality and prevent illegal actions by the latter. In other words, the AMCU is only an arbitrator between the customer and the participants in public procurement, who makes a decision “who is right” based on the study of the case and the evidence available in it.

However, in practice, the appeals body often contradicts itself in its conclusions, which leads to unfounded decisions and illogicality in general. This is explained by the fact that the appeals body can reject the evidence in the case, which should be considered proper and admissible, and also does not fully study the circumstances by which the public procurement customer justifies its earlier decisions. And therefore all this can create injustice when the final decision is made by the appeals body.

Advice! If you need to protect your interests in AMCU, be sure to contact the Prykhodko and Partners law firm, because we clearly understand how to defend your interests in practice.

What should you pay attention to in order to protect the interests of the customers of tenders in the AMKU?

In order to effectively protect the interests of the customer of public procurement, it is necessary to pay attention to the following, namely:

• If the complainant violates the 10-day period for a possible appeal of one of the two decisions of the contracting authority in one public procurement procedure, it means that the appeal body has no legal grounds for determining violations in the part of missing the period for appealing such a decision. For example, public procurement participants who file a complaint often appeal both the decision to reject a tender offer and the decision of the tenderer to determine the winner in one complaint. In such a situation, it is necessary to pay attention to the observance of the deadline for submitting a complaint, since the tender customer makes the decision to reject the tender offer and the winner of the public procurement usually on different days, and therefore the course of the appeal deadlines is not the same.
• Explanations of the customer on the merits of the complaint submitted to the appeal body, which contain additional grounds for rejecting the tender offer of the complaining participant, will not be considered by the appeal body. For example, clients of tenders in AMKU try to justify in some way the reasons for rejecting a tender offer of a public procurement participant, which were not specified in the decision of the tender committee. And, as a result, AMCU does not take these additional reasons into account when making a final decision.

Do you want to effectively protect your interests in AMKU? In this case, you cannot do without professional help from lawyers from the Prykhodko and Partners law firm.

Our team has excellent knowledge and many years of experience in the field of public procurement, which allows us to provide our clients with only high-quality legal support. Get in touch!