clarifications on the purchase of FFP2 masks
The Directorate General of the Public Administration and the Civil Protection Service deem it necessary to provide elements of clarity on the matter relating to the purchase of FFP2 masks recently the subject of articles in the local press.
It goes, first of all, how the legislator has established the obligation for all school operators, teaching and non-teaching staff, to wear FFP2 masks starting from January 17th.
Consequently, the public employer found itself in the urgent condition of guaranteeing its employees the availability of the respiratory protection device.
As foreseen in the legislation on public app vigoreti, the conditions existed for an urgent private negotiation even with a single company.
Even in the presence of the aforementioned conditions, the Administration decided, however, to proceed by broadening the competition and requesting estimates from three companies.
The identification of companies is by applying the rotation principle, a principle expressly established by the reference legislation precisely in order to prevent monopolistic or oligopolistic events in favor of larger and more structured companies and the consequent exclusion of other San Marino economic operators (normally the average ones and small) from the possibility of acquiring public contracts.
The rules on public procurement, in fact, do not limit the interest to obtaining the lowest price, but broaden the aims of the administrative action to pursue the objectives of free competition, equal treatment, transparency, rotation and advertising.
The fact that the Administration is required to comply with the higher criteria – and, in particular, that of rotation – implies that the companies already entrusted with multiple public contracts must be pre-authorized by the Contracting Authority and this even if this choice could abstractly involve the risk to “spend” more. In the case in question, therefore, the procedures have been complied with and the purchase price is in line with the market price, also in light of the results of previous tenders for the purchase of FFP2 masks carried out by other Bodies of the Enlarged Public Sector.
A further clarification deserves the alleged discrepancy between the investigation carried out by the Purchasing and General Services Office and the decisions taken by the State Congress at the time of the award.
On this point, in reality, it would be sufficient to read the preamble of the congress resolution more carefully to understand how the Executive decided to award the supply to the company that had presented the second best offer since the one that had proposed the lowest price was not San Marino and, above all, it was not, at the time of the award, registered in the Register of suppliers, the latter essential requirement, except for exceptional exceptions, to be beneficiaries of public contracts.
The Administration, therefore, decided to “spend more” to favor local contracting companies, in compliance with the rotation principle, rather than foreign companies.
This Directorate General and the Civil Protection Service do not at all believe that it is “scandalous” but absolutely in line with the regulatory context and with the guidelines adopted by the legislator, with even greater clarity, in the present pandemic period regarding the favor towards national companies . Moreover, the absolute linearity of the procedure observed is inferred from the fact that all the elements of the affair are deduced from the text of the congress resolution published on the internet, in compliance with the principles of maximum transparency that regulate the matter.
Finally, let some further reflection be allowed.
Asserting on the basis of an e-mail from a phantom unidentified company – which award, he writes after having become aware of the price charged by the company – that the Administration has “thrown” € 20,000.00, appears very simplistic.
Did this company really have a stock of the masks immediately available in the foreseen quantities? If available at that precise moment, were they masks with the same characteristics as those purchased? Were they certified masks? How is it possible, now several days after the request for offers, to certify that all the conditions were met and that the price hypothesized today could also be valid at that moment of maximum peak of market demand and without knowing the offers made by competing companies ?
This General Management, however, is available to provide any clarification to anyone interested, through its PAaperta service – tel. 0549 883434 – [email protected], by filling in the appropriate forms available on the portal www.gov.sm, section ” Forms and notifications “, as well as to professional operators of the press who deem it appropriate to acquire the position of the public part on the matter.
Press release
General Directorate of Public Function