Competition Law and Collusion in Public Procurement, Dr Penelope Giosa
5 November, 13:00-14:00
Online - Teams Webinar
Bid rigging is a grave competition law infringement that significantly compromises public procurement by causing artificially inflated prices and preventing public authorities from securing the most advantageous terms for public funds. My presentation, based on my recently published monograph “Competition Law and Collusion in Public Procurement” (Routledge 2025), utilizes auction theory as a benchmark to assess how the design of the EU's public procurement system under Directive 2014/24/EU creates vulnerabilities to collusive practices.
The focus will be on the following core structural and procedural design flaws:
a) Market Consultation Risk: How direct engagement with market operators during preliminary market consultation facilitates collusion before tendering.
b) Use of Lots: How the division of public contracts into lots, intended to boost SME participation, can encourage bidders to "share the pie"
c) Framework Agreements (FAs): How the closed system and long duration of FAs create stable, oligopolistic markets highly susceptible to collusion
d) E-Auction Transparency Paradox: How excessive information disclosure (such as competitor rankings) provides bidders with the necessary tools to monitor and stabilize their collusive agreements.
By pinpointing these design weaknesses, the presentation offers a foundation for recommending targeted procurement reforms to make public tenders collusion proof.
Biography
Penelope Giosa is a Lecturer in Law at the University of Reading and a Fellow at the George Washington Competition & Innovation Lab. She is an active member of the legal community, serving as the Convenor of the SLS (Society of Legal Scholars) Comparative Law Section and as Secretary of the British Association of Comparative Law (BACL).
Dr. Giosa holds qualifications as a non-practising lawyer in both Greece and Cyprus. She has advanced her research through visiting fellowships at several renowned institutions, including the University of California Los Angeles (UCLA, 2023), the University of Oxford’s Institute of European and Comparative Law (2022), and Georgetown Law School (Washington D.C., 2019). Her time at Georgetown was supported by the prestigious American Bar Association, Section of Antitrust Law International Scholar in Residence Program.
Dr. Giosa’s research focuses on the intersection of Public Procurement, Competition Law, and Economic Crime. She also has a keen interest in State Aid and the role of law in promoting sustainable development and mitigating climate change.
