Abstract

Particularly harmful to finance and public procurement are bid riggings, i.e. agreeing the contents of bids. They are countered in the Polish law by at least three methods, namely with: civil law, administrative, and penal remedies. As regards civil law remedies, of fundamental importance are corrective measures to be applied independently by the contracting authority organizing the auction (or a different contracting procedure), and failure to do so may be appealed to the National Appeal Chamber. In particular, the dishonest competitor should be disqualified by elimination from public procurement bidding or rejection of their bid. Of secondary importance are traditional indemnification measures, which need to be improved, however, due to code-based restrictions concerning guilt and other premises for indemnification in order to be fully correspondent with the European requirements for successful liability. Not without meaning is also the request for judicial annulment of the final agreement concluded as a result of bid rigging filed by the contracting authority of the President of the Public Procurement Office. A matter of criticism is the fact that the harmed competitor may not bring in an independent action himself and has to use intermediation of the President of the Public Procurement Office. Administrative remedies are mostly financial penalties imposed on bid rigging participants by way of individual decisions issued by the anti-monopoly authority, as well as personal responsibility of officials acting on behalf of the contracting authority, under the administrative law, for infringement of public finance discipline. Penal remedies are linked primarily with the regulation of Art. 305 of the Criminal Code providing for punishability of a collusion to the detriment of the party on behalf of which the auction is organized.