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NRW Prime Minister Laschet: The lawyers cite the van Laack affair as a negative example
Photo: Christoph Hardt / imago images / Future Image
The controversial deal between the North Rhine-Westphalian state government and the textile manufacturer van Laack is once again the trigger for fierce criticism.
Around two dozen specialist lawyers for procurement law from all over Germany have written an open letter in which they accuse the NRW authorities, other state governments and the federal government of "systematically disregarding EU procurement law".
According to the letter, the development is "fatal" and "harmful" to democracy.
The letter is available to SPIEGEL and was sent to politicians in the EU Commission and the German Bundestag on Monday.
The authors write that competition and transparency when awarding public contracts are among the cornerstones of the European Union.
But especially in the case of "large-volume procurement processes" by politics, guidelines are increasingly being overridden.
The corona pandemic works "like a fire accelerator".
Taxpayers and medium-sized companies suffer
There are more and more orders "without real competition", which is legally inadmissible.
Some contracts would be awarded “at greatly increased prices”, for which the taxpayers would have to pay in the end.
Medium-sized companies are also suffering because they »don't get a chance to prove themselves in the competition they would like to face«.
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The lawyers cite the van Laack affair as a negative example.
Last year, the NRW government repeatedly ordered corona protective equipment from the textile manufacturer van Laack, without a prior tender.
The case brought Prime Minister and Union Chancellor candidate Armin Laschet (CDU) in distress.
His son, who works for van Laack as an influencer, established the contact between the company and the prime minister.
Laschet had to be accused of having practiced nepotism.
He still rejects the accusation to this day.
His state government announced that the Federal Ministry of Economics recommended a "negotiation procedure without a competition" in March 2020.
"Roped parties seem more important than EU requirements"
In addition to the van Laack deal, the open letter names 14 other order procedures that are said to have been illegal.
The lawyers accuse eleven federal states of having bought the license for the Corona warning app Luca "without any competition".
The state of Berlin is also criticized, which is said to have commissioned a company in a "direct award" and again "without any competition" to build corona test centers for more than 80 million euros.
Even in a pandemic, the authors write, "if there is an urgency" tenders "with shorter deadlines" are possible, as is "competition with several companies".
"Politicians like to claim that they are under particularly great time pressure during the crisis when it comes to assignments, but that is an old wives' tale," says lawyer Thomas Mösinger, one of the initiators of the letter. "Sometimes clergy and clergy seem to be more important than EU requirements, which increases distrust in the state."