OREANDA-NEWS. On March 07, 2010 comes into force No.67 Order of the Federal Antimonopoly Service (FAS Russia), which sets the Rules of competitive bidding transferring state and municipal property for use or into possession . This document further develops the norms of the Federal Law "On Protection of Competition", reported the press-centre of FAS Russia.

The Rules introduce mandatory auctions with rigorous and transparent procedures, covering, in particular, fixed assets of state and municipal enterprises and organizations.

The main conceptual novelty is the exhaustive list of incidents when bidding must be organized in the form of tenders. Therefore, in allocating the right for use and possession of state and municipal property priority is given to auctions as the most open and transparent procedure.

Competitive bidding organized in accordance with the Rules must be open in terms of participating bidders and the form of the bids, which is essential for publicity and transparency in transferring the rights.

The old auction procedures (applied in accord with the transitional provisions) provided for closed bids at the auctions for the right to transfer state and municipal property, which left much room for abusing practice. Being unable to offer a higher contract price, many economic entities had to sign away long leased property and clear long occupied premises: even if they were prepared to offer a more favourable price, the auction procedures did not allow to do this.

The new bidding procedures have many novelties and protective mechanisms for both the organizers and participating bidders.

For instance, it is not allowed to set other requirements to the bidders than specified in the laws of the Russian Federalization.

The Rules have an exhaustive list of the grounds for refusing bidder's participation. To prevent manipulations with requirements to bidders and participants, the Rules introduced the norm that "documents on tenders and auctions cannot include requirements to the bidders (in particular, bidders qualification, including work experience), as well as the requirements for production capacity, technological equipment, labour, financial and other resources of participants of tenders or auctions". Such provisions eliminate unjustified excessive requirements to the bidders.

The mechanisms for protecting the organizers of competitive bidding from economically unsound bids include financial security of the bids and financial security of contract enforcement. According to the Rules, the size of the deposit, securing contract enforcement, is to be determined by the organizers.

The Rules also address the problem of arbitrary criteria for bids evaluation and importance of those criteria. The "significance' factor of each criteria is 0.25. Earlier the absence of a single procedure for bids evaluation and proportional bid estimation often resulted in manipulations with the bidding criteria by both the organizers and unfair bidders.

Information support of competitive bidding is a very importance requirements introduced by the Rules. A tender or auction notice must be published 30 working days before the event on the official Internet site and n the official print media.

Information about tenders and auctions will be published on a single portal - torgi.gov.ru, which will be launched in the near future.

According to Igor Artemyev, the Head of FAS Russia, coming into force of the Order, that introduces priority of auction procedures and transparent rules of tenders and auctions, will strongly support development of competition for the rights to use state and municipal property and, therefore, combating corruption.

"Providing equal access to property, the state not only acts as an efficient owner but also creates conditions for growth in practically all segments of the economy, because it eliminates a powerful mechanism of discriminating some companies and granting privileges to others at the pleasure of local bureaucrats", summarized Igor Artemyev.