Lobby Contract Breaks Kosovo Law on Tenders

Pristina’s decision to take on the top US firm Patton Boggs, without considering rival bids, flouts Kosovo’s own laws on tendering.Kosovo’s government has awarded a lobbying contract worth 600,000 euro a year without a tender process, Balkan Insight has discovered. The decision to hand the one-year lucrative deal to one of Washington’s top lobby firms, Patton Boggs, appears blatantly to breach the law on public procurement. By law, the Office of the Prime Minister, which is leading the process, should have gained permission from the Public Procurement Agency, PPA, before awarding any such deal.

As it had decided to negotiate the price with only one firm, the Office of the Prime Minister should have applied to the PPA with documents demonstrating why only one firm could supply the services.
Only then, according to law, would the government have been allowed to begin negotiations with a specific lobby company. On October 5, the government issued a decision that it was allocating the 50,000-euro-a-month contract to Patton Boggs to “promote and protect the interests of the institutions of the Republic of Kosovo abroad”. The head of the PPA, Mursel Racaj, told Balkan Insight that he was not aware the deal had been awarded. “I don’t have any information on this case,” he told Balkan Insight. “I don’t recall anything about this particular contract.” Racaj was unable to identify any documents in his agency relating to the deal, while confirming that the PPA needed first to agree to any awards of negotiated contracts.

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