Abstract

The Public Procurement Law obligates prospective contractors to exercise due care as early as the bidding stage. To this end, public procurers require them to submit a bid bond, which, on one hand, is intended to perform a disciplinary function and, on the other, to serve as a guarantee for the conclusion of a public procurement contract. However, at the times of computerisation of public procurement (which has been ongoing since 2018), the issue of submitting a bid bond in an electronic form, as mentioned in Art. 97(10) of the Public Procurement Law, has not been fully clarified. This is important because failure to submit a bid bond in the prescribed manner and form results in rejecting the contractor’s bid - which, given the punitive character of the Public Procurement Law provisions, should only be done in unambiguous and unquestionable cases.
Thus, the purpose of this article is to address the issues related to the possibility of submitting a guarantee and bid bond in an electronic form under the provisions of the Public Procurement Law of 11 September 2019.