Serbia ready for negotiations about chapter on public procurement

The head of the European integration sector in the EU Delegation to Serbia, Radica Nusdorfer, said on Thursday, October 20, that Serbia was technically ready to open chapter 5, dealing with public procurement, within the negotiations on the accession to the EU.

– This will be a hard chapter, we have a lot of work ahead of us – Nusdorfer said and added that competitiveness, transparency and implementation of laws were needed in order to make the fight against corruption more successful.

The World Bank Country Manager for Serbia, Tony Verheijen, believes that professionalization and ethics are very important in public procurement procedures.

– Each investment in the improvement of public procurement procedures has shown to be useful from various aspects. So far, 3,000 people have been trained and certified for running public procurement procedures – Verheijen said.

The director of the Public Procurement Office of Serbia, Predrag Jovanovic, said that the public procurement system in Serbia had improved considerably and that only 3% of the procedures were being carried out through negotiations, as opposed to 50% from several years before.

– The average duration of a procedure has also been reduced. Last year, it took 77 days on average, and this year the average duration is 61 days. The number of terminated agreements has also dropped. In the past two years, the percentage of successful procedures has risen from 86% to 90% – Jovanovic said.

He said that, at the moment, it was needed to follow the realization of procurement agreements and control whether the best goods or services were provided for the money given and added that EUR 3 billion was set aside for public procurement from the budgets of the state and local self-governments each year.

Uprava za javne nabavke Beograd

Delegacija Evropske unije u Republici Srbiji Beograd

Svetska Banka-WB Beograd

public procurement

EU Delegation to Serbia

Radica Nusdorfer

chapter 5 in negotiations on accession to EU

World Bank

Tony Verheijen

Predrag Jovanovic