| 11/10/2011 Faculty hosts its first LLM in-house conference on “Government Contracts and Public Procurement Regulation 2011” On 11 October the University of StellenboschLaw Faculty hosted its first LLM in-house conference on “Government Contracts and Public Procurement Regulation”. Students who are registered for the LLM course in Public Procurement Regulation, offered by Professor Phoebe Bolton, presented papers on two themes in particular, namely the use of self-cleaning (rehabilitation) as an exception to the debarment or exclusion of contractors and the incorporation of environmental criteria in South Africa’s public procurement system. The students who participated in the conference hail from Germany, the Netherlands and South Africa. |
| 13/10/2011 Faculty hosts its second “Government Contracts and Public Procurement Law Mini-Conference 2011”On 13 October the University of Stellenbosch Law Faculty hosted its second “Government Contracts and Public Procurement Law Mini Conference”. Students who are registered for the undergraduate course in Public Procurement Law presented papers on various topics. The topics ranged from the combating of procurement corruption, the regulation of the pre-award period of the government procurement process, and the contracting out of government functions. |
| 31/10/2011 Local Procurement Accord signedGovernment, organised business, trade unions and a number of civil society organisations signed a Local Procurement Accord on Monday 31 October. In terms of the agreement signatories will actively favour local procurement and has set a target of 75% of procurement to be locally sourced. The accord includes both public and private procurement. Government indicated that it will use the new Preferential Procurement Regulations that are due to come into effect on 7 December to favour local goods. A South African Bureau of Standards standard will be used to define what will qualify as local goods within particular product categories. Indications are that the first group of categories to be designated under the new Regulations for local preference in procurement will include buses, power pylons, railway rolling stock, pharmaceuticals, set-top boxes for televisions, uniforms and other clothing products, certain food products and office furniture and school furniture.See the full media statement on the accord here.
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| 24/10/2011 Establishment of new unit on African public procurement regulation research announced The establishment of an African public procurement regulation research unit was announced by Prof Geo Quinot of the University of Stellenbosch, South Africa, at the close of the first day of the Public Procurement Regulation in Africa Conference on 24 October. The unit (of which the exact name must still be finalised) will start operating in 2012 and will be based in the Faculty of Law at the University of Stellenbosch. The aim of the unit will be to continue the work on public procurement regulation in Africa that was started in the UK Africa Public Procurement Project in partnership between the Public Procurement Research Group (PPRG) at the University of Nottingham and the Stellenbosch Faculty of Law. This will include continued research on public procurement regulation on the African continent, training in public procurement regulation and the building of networks in Africa and with similar units elsewhere such as the PPRG. Making the announcement Prof Quinot noted that “the creation of the unit is essential to keep the momentum of the UK Africa Project going and to establish a permanent platform for in-depth research in an area of law that is critical to development in Africa, but currently largely neglected”.
More details on the new unit will be made available in due course on the UK Africa Project website at www.sun.ac.za/procurementlaw. |
| 27/09/2011 Sope Williams-Elegbe on anti-corruption measures in public procurementOn 27 September 2011 Dr Sope Williams-Elegbe delivered a lecture at the Stellenbosch Law Faculty to Masters level students in public procurement regulation. The title of her lecture was “Regulatory Techniques to Address Corruption in Public Procurement”. In her lecture, Dr Williams-Elegbe set out the different forms of corruption in public procurement and focussed on legal measures that may be taken against corrupt practices. Debarment (also referred to as exclusion, blacklisting or disqualification) was one of the primary measures she covered and in doing so she focused on the regulatory measures in place in the United States, the European Union and in South Africa. She further discussed the general problems that accompany the use of debarment as a regulatory tool and also looked at anti-corruption agreements (integrity pacts) and the imposition of monetary penalties as anti-corruption measures.
Dr Williams-Elegbe is a member of the Public Procurement Research Group at the University of Nottingham in the United Kingdom. There she heads the Corruption and Public Procurement Unit and her main teaching and research interests lie in the field of public procurement, international economic law and international commercial law. She is the reviews editor of the Public Procurement Law Review and an editor of the Journal of African Law. She further sits on the board of the Nigerian Monthly Law Reports and is a member of the World Bank’s International Advisory Group on Procurement, which advises the World Bank on its procurement policies.
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| 09/06/2011 New South African Preferential Procurement RegulationsFollowing a process to revise the Preferential Procurement Regulations, 2001 under the Preferential Procurement Policy Framework Act 5 of 2000 that started with a draft in 2004 and a second draft in 2009, Treasury announced the new Preferential Procurement Regulations, 2011to come into effect on 7 December 2011. The new regulations are aligned to the Broad-Based Black Economic Empowerment Act 53 of 2003 in the way that preference is awarded to tenderers. Further changes include specific provision for preferencing of local production in public tenders, the use of functionality as a qualification criterion and the extension of the applicability of the regulations to also include state-owned entreprises, which were previously exempt from these regulations and could thus adopt their own preferential procurement schemes. |
| 13/01/2011 Comprehensive Bibliography on Public Procurement Law PublishedA comprehensive bibliography listing English language materials on public procurement regulation world-wide has been published under the auspices of the EU-Asia Inter University Network for Teaching and Research in Public Procurement Regulation under the supervision of Prof Sue Arrowsmith of the Public Procurement Research Group at the University of Nottingham. The bibliography is updated annually and is hosted on the University of Nottingham website. The bibliography also contains a section listing materials on African public procurement regulation. |