This year budget 9 billion and 166 million dinars of the Secretariat for Traffic. Ten percent of that money is frozen, due to unfinished public procurement. Citizens are harmed.
Nikola Radin, executive director of Belgrade on the move and authorized internal auditor in the public sector, tells "Vreme" that the latest disputed tender of this Secretariat refers to procurement of software for the optimization of the zonal adaptive system for managing the work of light signaling based on short-term
forecast of future traffic requirements, worth 83,3 million dinars.
Common practice
Namely, this tender, like many previous ones, was given to the Commission for the Protection of Rights in Public Procurement Procedures, and the money cannot be used until the Commission makes a decision.
Nikola Radin explains that this is a common practice. "A public procurement is announced, among the conditions there is one that can be satisfied by only one bidder, and the others suspect that it was done on purpose, so they complain to the Commission. The tender is justifiably stopped because it is clearly disputed, and up to half a year can pass until the Commission investigates the complaint."
Until the final decision is made, the client has no right to continue or terminate
public procurement procedure. If violations of the law are found, the tender is canceled in whole or in part, and the contracting authority is obliged to repeat the procedure.
"In practice, this often means months of downtime, extension of deadlines and blocking of funds, which therefore hinders the implementation of ongoing projects because the tenderer cannot transfer the frozen money to another project. Of course, responsibility for poorly prepared procedures remains unclear or completely absent," says Nikola Radin.
7 million euros have been blocked.
"With these and the previously overturned procedures, a total of around 7 million euros, or more than 833 million dinars of public money, has been blocked. That money is trapped in failed tenders, while the city suffocates in traffic chaos every day," says Radin.
The organization "Belgrade on the Move" pointed out a few months ago about the tender of the Secretariat for Transport worth about 750 million dinars, intended for
modernization of light signaling on the street network.
Radin recalls that "that procedure also ended before the Commission, with serious doubts about the setting of conditions. The technical criteria, as was warned at the time, were
are set so that they can be filled by a limited number of bidders, while
the offered prices significantly exceeded comparable projects in the region."
Radin believes that "this is no longer a series of individual mistakes, but an established model of work and that the problem of failed tenders for traffic lights "grows beyond the scope of individual procedures and becomes a symptom of broader institutional dysfunction. When public procurements are repeatedly rejected due to the same or similar failures, it is no longer a question of legal procedure, but of the ability of the system to implement its own decisions in general."
"In this context, the question is no longer whether Belgrade has the money to modernize traffic, but whether it has the capacity and political will to manage that money in accordance with the law and public interest. Because when tenders regularly fail, and millions remain blocked, it becomes clear that the problem is not in the market, but in the way the city government manages the processes."
A question of responsibility
For this reason, he says, "the question of the political and professional responsibility of the Secretary of Transportation Bojan Bovan, as well as the need for a complete, independent audit of all tenders in the field of light signaling - not only those that have been rejected, but also those that have formally passed, whose effects are not seen in practice" is opened.
Radin says that the number of tenders submitted to the Commission "is not publicly available".
"The solution to this problem would not only be for the Commissions to work faster, because everyone in the chain is responsible. And above all, unrigged tenders should be made," concludes Nikola Radin.
