Policy OLAF BT

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The preventive role of the judiciary in protecting the financial interest of the European Union.
A comparative analysis for improved performance
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of some information, especially in cases where the publication of the decision has already been ruled as
a complementary sanction73.
In practice, the situations are very different for the four cases analysed as part of this research:
 Lithuania implements two types of black lists based on economic operators’ previous behaviour
in participating to public procurement procedures and implementing public contracts. Moreover,
there is a privately managed online platform where information on each legal
person ‘legal history’ is published based on the publicly accessible court decisions, however it is
not an official source of information.
 Romania implements a public, yet not easily accessible, record of convictions of legal persons
and a mechanism ensuring the impossibility to bid alone to public procurement of an entity
criminally convicted and sanctioned with the ban from public procurement;
 in Greece, although no criminal sanction can be decided against legal persons, bans from public
procurement can be applied as administrative sanctions. In this context, article 74 paragraph 6
of Law 4412/2016 provides for the establishment of a National Database of Public Contracts
which shall maintain a list of economic operators which have been debarred and shall include
their data and the period of exclusion. However, such Database remains to be established via a
relevant ministerial decision.
 In Italy, there is no public access database. Each prosecution office of the Italian Republic has a
database under the name of "casellario giudiziale" (judicial record), where all proceedings
involving natural and legal persons are recorded. Public authorities may apply for access to the
Register if it has a specific interest such as the control of the eligibility of the participants in the
tenders.
In the Lithuanian case , the Public Procurement Office manages a database of unreliable suppliers (‘the
black list of suppliers’)74 – a list of suppliers that have implemented the tender contract inappropriately
or failed to implement it, where such a failure is an substantial breach of a contract (for cases after 1
January, 2016; a substantial breach of contract is interpreted both following the Civil Code norms on
substantial contracts clauses, and the contract clauses between the bidder and the contracting authority).
For this database, the contracting authority must terminate the contract with the supplier and if (a) the
supplier does not dispute this in court; or (b) the court upholds that the contract has been terminated
lawfully and due to a substantive breach of contract on the part of the supplier, the contracting authority
may add the supplier to the “List of Unreliable Suppliers”, with a maximum delay of 10 days. An official
request regarding this operation must be sent by the contracting authority to the Public Procurement
Office. The Public Procurement Office is responsible for administering the list and making it public.
Economic operators remain on the list for 3 years. The economic operators (both legal and natural
persons) that are on this list are excluded from the tender at the bidding stage as each contracting
authority in Lithuania must note among the qualification requirements of each procurement procedure
that all bidders that are on the “List of Unreliable Suppliers” are not eligible (regardless of the type of
contract that lead to them being added to the list).
73 Interview with Prosecutor Mr. Walter Mapelli (Court of Bergamo).
74 Available online, in Lithuanian last
accessed: 30/06/2017).