Antitrust Authority and Anti-Corruption Authority, together, to condemn the awarding of public contracts through the so-called "posthumous adhesion". What is it about? It consists in the subsequent accession, arranged by a contracting station without competitive confrontation, to the results of a public tender announced by another administration. In practice: the Lombardy Region, for example, adheres without competition to the contract won by company X which participated and won the public tender announced, for example, by the Lazio Region. At the origin of this practice is the search for cost savings, connected to the participation in a tender, both for companies and administrations.
The risk is that this type of assignment may however circumvent the principles of protection of competition and the provisions on the assignment of public contracts.
In fact, the two Authorities observe, for the mechanism of posthumous adhesion to be legitimate, "correct planning of the needs to be met through the assignment and precise definition of the value of the contract subject to tender is necessary, which must also include any renewals or subsequent accessions”.
Furthermore, "the posthumous acceptance clause envisaged in the tender documentation must be circumscribed and well determined both from a subjective point of view (contracting authorities that will be able to participate in the tender) and objective (maximum value of posthumous assignment allowed)".
Finally, it is highlighted that posthumous acceptance should not, in any case, give rise to renegotiation of the object of the contract, in terms of both the type of activity to be performed and the economic conditions to be applied.
"Only if all the aforementioned conditions are rigorously respected - concludes Antitrust and Anac - can the posthumous membership mechanism be legitimately used as a means of aggregating demand in order to achieve any cost savings".
