The European Commission published its 2026 Rule of Law Report last week, accompanied by individual Country Reports. This post will focus on the Country Report for Croatia. The recommendations are as follows: Reading the recommendations, you would be forgiven thinking that everything is fine and well in public procurement. No recommendations, which can be…
Read more 2026 Croatia Rule of Law Report from a Procurement Lens: Nothing to See Here, Move Along
It’s been an exciting summer for public procurement scholars and practitioners alike so far, and the excitement will culminate in early September! The date of (official) publication of the draft Public Procurement Regulation has shifted a couple times, but this hasn’t stopped the leak of an early version of that draft – driving early commentary…
Read more Wishlist Item 1 – A Local Content Recital in the New Public Procurement Regulation
The cat is out of the bag – it’s going to be a Regulation! Although I can’t claim thinking and writing about the benefits of a regulation over a directive as long as my friend Pedro (read his post on the matter here, but also this one here), I’ll try and make a sinilar…
Read more We need a public procurement Regulation
The Public Procurement Directives are in the midst of revision and we expect the Commission to publish a draft Regulation in early September. Since everyone likes to be told what to do (especially by an academic), I decided to write a paper on what should the Commission do with the participation of third-country economic operators…
Read more New preprint on SSRN – ”Exclusive Competence Without Comprehensive Legislation: The Constitutional Deficit in the Treatment of Third-Country Economic Operators in EU Public Procurement”
This will be the shortest post I ever wrote: the book is out – go buy it! Here it the link, the first chapter is open access!
Read more Book is out – ”Third Country Economic Operators in EU Procurement Law Conditions for Market Participation”
The previous post on this blog reported a dataset of 185 Croatian public procurement procedures published between December 2025 and May 2026, in which contracting authorities had stated their intention to exclude third-country economic operators in accordance with the post-Kolin amendment to the Regulation on Procurement Documentation and Tender in Public Procurement Procedures. The combined…
Read more Why Only Construction Exclusions Work: More on the Croatian Third-Country Economic Operator Exclusions Dataset
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…
Read more 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
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…
Read more Local Content Just Won’t Die – And Poland’s Government Is Making It Worse
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,…
Read more Sports Federations and Public Procurement: A Love Story That Never Happened
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%…
Read more 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
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