Head of Public Procurement: I don't receive information about what is going on with public procurements in time

In an interview to ZF prior to announcing that procurement worth billions of euros could be cancelled, Cristina Trăilă said "I can't" five times in the first 10 minutes.

Cristina Trăilă, chairperson of the National Authority for Regulating and Monitoring Public Procurement (ANRMAP), says she has too little power and too few personnel to be able to supervise a market worth 19 billion euros in 2010, the value of public procurement procedures initiated by the SEAP - Electronic System for Public Procurement.
The head of the Procurement Authority, which should monitor public procurement in view of transparency and in order to make savings, says she gets the data requested "by post". The institution does not make analyses, monitor companies or institutions that could be suspected of fraud based on the value of contracts signed, because it only looks at the "legality of every contract".

Cristina Trăilă last week told a press conference that she would ask the courts of law to cancel all contracts sealed by the state's institutions that are not part of the SEAP.
However, we are talking about contracts worth hundreds of millions of euros here, considering that the "shopping" done by the state in 2008 and 2009 amounted to 26 billion euros, while in 2010 SEAP procurement procedures alone amounted to 19 billion euros.

ANRMAP does not get data on time because the SEAP does not supply it on time, Trăilă says. At the moment, an institution that has to buy something via SEAP sends the documents to ANRMAP for approval and then to the public procurement system.

The public procurement market accounts for around 15% of Romania's GDP. The state, through its institutions, is the biggest buyer. As a result, interest for the state's acquisitions is very high.

However, at the same time, some companies who do business with the state, have over the course of time complained that they are expected to bribe in order to earn contracts. However, they have not terminated their contracts, but continued to do business with the public authorities.