Bid rigging has long been a priority of the Romanian Competition Council ("RCC"), and a few years back, it set up a separate department looking to deal in particular with this type of infringement. In addition, in 2017, the RCC issued two guides on anticompetitive conduct in relation to (public) tenders – one Guide regarding participation in a public tender in a consortium and one Guide aimed at identifying anticompetitive procedures during (public) tenders. However, recently the RCC aims to refine its approach to benefit from modern technology. To this end, the RCC will acquire a Big Data IT system, to be used to identify likely bid rigging cases. The acquisition of the IT system will be financed with EUR 10.7 million of non-reimbursable EU funds. The project will be developed in partnership with the Special Telecommunications Service STS, which will provide the know-how and logistic support.
Once implemented, the system will allow the RCC to analyse high data volumes significantly quicker.
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