One-bid tenders are the norm

More than three out of every seven public contracts are awarded following procedures in which there was only one tender, and even when there is more than one tender the average per procedure is only 2.6 participants.

These revealing findings are included in a recent report by the European Court of Auditors and confirm that public contracts, despite successive changes in the institutional framework, remain an "open wound" for public revenues, but also a source of corruption and entanglement and of course distortion of competition. Although according to the report, Greece presents one of the lowest percentages of direct concessions in the European Union, at the same time it shows a large percentage of contracts in which segmentation has taken place - that often hides "sharing" of the market and direct concessions - and a very low rate of publication of contracts on the...