According to Çiğdem Toker from Sözcü daily, the Public Procurement Authority Monitoring Report demonstrates how the AKP favours especially its supporting bosses through the use of bargaining that should be used under special circumstances. Toker argues that this illustrates how discretionary the processes of procurement proceeds.
According to the report that demonstrates the public procurements in the first six months of 2019, the total public procurements is 28,238 and the total cost for the contracts is 56,355 million TRY. Bargaining should be utilized under special conditions which require urgency and the law demonstrates six urgent situations.
Leaving the special conditions arising from the case of security and defence aside, there are two clauses that cause discretion. One of the clauses enables the public institutions to have different limits of purchase. It further enables the public institutions not to publicly announce the procurement under certain limit, meaning particular corporations can be invited to this closed bidding through various communication methods.
This limit is now 301.2 TRY. The number of such closed biddings is 5,135. The total cost of such closed biddings is 910.4 million TRY, of which 555.8 million TRY is the purchase of commodity and 354.5 million TRY is the purchase of service.
The other clause of the law requires the unforeseeable cases of natural disasters. The total cost of closed biddings on the basis of the clause is 9.5 billion TRY, of which 6.8 billion TRY is construction. According to Toker, it is debatable to what extent we now live in secure spaces against natural disasters.
