Elisabetta Manunza in Eindhovens Dagblad on public procurement rules and Chinese competition

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Prof. dr. Elisabetta Manunza was asked to provide expert comments in the Eindhovens Dagblad of Saturday 14 December, a regional newspaper in the Netherlands, about the procurement of 259 buses by the Dutch province of Overijssel with a Chinese company.

The procurement coincides with the discussion about the protection of European companies against unfair competition from, among other countries, China. The Dutch government has put forward a proposal in Brussels that should prevent such unfair competition. Members of the Dutch Parliament have asked whether the rules in that proposal would have led to a different outcome in this public procurement procedure.

According to professor Manunza, the matter is complicated. "It is legally complex to determine which law applies because companies establish themselves - via subsidiaries - in our country or in other EU countries. This makes it difficult to consider a company as non-European." The province cannot include as a selection criterion that the buses must be produced locally, because it would be in violation of the European public procurement rules. However, environmental and social requirements can be included in the procurement document. Manunza would like to see the issue in a broader, also political, context. The final question is "to what extent the Netherlands is willing to trade with China and other countries, knowing, for example, that our environmental and social standards as well as fundamental rights protection are much more extensive than abroad."

For the entire article (in Dutch), .