UPRAVNO PRAVO

From Freshwater Fish Burgers to Big Infrastructure Projects: An Empirical Update on Third-Country Economic Operator Exclusions in Croatia 18 Months after the Kolin Judgment

It has become unconfirmed ”common knowledge” that Croatian contracting authorities are not excluding third-country economic operators, and that it’s still business as usual. This seemed especially to be the case in late September 2025, when I submitted the manuscript for my upcoming book to Edward Elgar. A lot of time has passed since then, and…

Local Content Just Won’t Die – And Poland’s Government Is Making It Worse

A brief disclaimer before I get into this: what follows is based on two news reports – one from XYZ’s Poland Unpacked newsletter and one from MILMAG – covering the launch of Poland’s “Local Content: For the Benefit of Poland” initiative on 9 April 2026. If the statements attributed to Prime Minister Donald Tusk and…

Sports Federations and Public Procurement: A Love Story That Never Happened

A new corruption case has recently been uncovered in Croatia, this time in the Croatian Ski Association. The former director was charged with syphoning over 30 million EUR over many years. If you’re interested in the story, here is a good summary; machine translation will work well. Since I seem to have a one-track mind,…

Buy European, But How? What the Public Consultation on the Revision of the Public Procurement Directives Tells Us About European Preferences and Third-Country Economic Operators

On 27 March 2026, the Commission published the Factual Summary Report on the Public Consultation on the Revision of the Public Procurement Directives. Of the 1,037 responses received, the overwhelming majority came from business-related stakeholders — companies and business associations together make up 47% of respondents, with public authorities at 13%, trade unions at 11%…

Registration Open: “Geopolitics and Public Procurement” Conference — Zagreb, 1 July 2026

The University of Zagreb Faculty of Law and the Croatian Employers’ Association are pleased to announce that registration is now open for the international conference “Geopolitics and Public Procurement”, to be held on 1 July 2026 at the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb (Trg Republike Hrvatske 3, Lecture Room III). Attendance is free. Register…

The Industrial Accelerator Act and Public Procurement: A Step Forward, Several Steps Sideways

The European Commission published its proposal for the Industrial Accelerator Act (IAA) on 4 March 2026. The proposal establishes a framework of measures for the acceleration of industrial capacity and decarbonisation in strategic sectors. Pedro Telles has already published a very useful reflection on the proposal on his blog (https://www.telles.eu/some-preliminary-impressions-on-the-industrial-accelerator-act-proposal/), which I recommend reading alongside…

New paper – Transparency or Efficiency? The Prevalence of Arbitration Clauses in Croatian Public Procurement Draft Contracts

New paper out! I spent weeks scraping 17,695 public procurement notices from Croatia’s electronic procurement platform (EOJN) and going through 6,409 draft contracts to answer a question nobody has empirically tackled in Croatia before: how often do contracting authorities actually choose private arbitration over regular courts for resolving public procurement contract disputes? The short answer…

Anti-Coercion Instrument – it’s not a trade bazooka, it’s a trade trebuchet

Anti-Coercion Instrument is in the news again, this time as a potential tool to counter the new tariffs threat from the US. It was not used the last time, but all bets are off this time around. This is all, at least from a policy and normative perspective, very unexpected, as the ACI was envisaged…

New paper on SSRN – ‘Is there a place for local content requirements in EU public procurement?’

Local content requirements (LCRs) are gaining traction within the European Union, particularly in certain Member States. In this preprint, I seek to define LCRs in the context of EU public procurement, to assess whether their use should be evaluated solely on the basis of strict economic and market criteria, and – most importantly – to…

Prijedlog izmjena Zakona o javnoj nabavi – dosta dobrog ali (neki) veliki problemi ostaju

Jučer je Ministarstvo gospodarstva (MINGO) u javno savjetovanje pustilo prijedlog novih izmjena Zakona o javnoj nabavi (ZJN), prvi od nesretnih izmjena s kraja 2022. Pohvalno je da javno savjetovanje traje 30 dana, a dostupno je ovdje. Na prvih nekoliko čitanja, ne mogu se oteti dojmu kako se moglo više. Iako se predložene izmjene čine opsežnima,…