BAKU, Azerbaijan, Jan. 12
Trend:
New measures are being developed to tighten purchase procedures in Kazakhstan, Serik Zhumangarin, chairman of the Agency for Protection and Development of Competition, said on Facebook, Trend reports citing his respective publication.
According to Zhumangarin, the agency, together with the authorized entities, will propose new approaches to the provision of measures of state support for businesses.
Some of the measures have already formed the basis of the recently adopted law on the development of competition, he noted.
In particular, the law defines competitive principles for the provision of state support measures, antimonopoly monitoring of their observance.
Besides, the law establishes requirements and criteria for agreeing with the agency the state measures which, first of all, will take into account the level of concentration of the commodity market, its monopolization, barriers for getting access to the market, the share of small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs), the market balance, the level of state participation, and compliance with competition laws.
At the same time, new measures are being developed to tighten the procurement procedures of the Samruk-Kazyna fund, national companies and expand access to government and quasi-government purchases of SMEs and new market entities.
First of all, according to the agency’s head, the current purchase procedures will be revised in order to exclude the rules restricting competition and reduce the grounds for purchase from one source.
Zhumangarin also noted that the norms for reducing the volume of public purchases from one source have been already reflected in the law on the development of competition: within 52 legislative grounds in force allowing conduct direct purchases, the application of six norms is limited, and two were excluded.
"The approaches being developed today include the decentralization of purchases, the formation of a mandatory list of goods purchased from micro and small businesses, the reduction or elimination of threshold requirements for increasing the number of participants,” he said.
The mentioned approaches also include the abolition of subscription fees for access to digital systems and other measures aimed at increasing price competition, Zhumangarin added.
“The law also envisages the formation of a complete list and reduction of the grounds for allocating state assignments, which is the most popular form of financing state-owned companies," he said.
The chairman stressed that the proposed list will limit the growth of non-competitive purchases of goods and form a legal basis for its further reduction.
"We’ll intensify the work to identify cartels in public purchases, and now we are working on a draft decision to lift the moratorium on inspections and antimonopoly control in bidding and purchases," he concluded.