MOSCOW. Nov 3 (Interfax) - The Russian government has determined five defense and security departments and agencies which will do all their procurements using closed tenders staring January 1, 2022 under a government resolution published on the legal information web portal.
The five are the Defense Ministry, the Foreign Intelligence Service (SVR), the Federal Security Service (FSB), the Federal Protection Service, and the National Guard and their subdivisions and companies, the document says.
All purchases, whether or not for defense and security purposes, will be made electronically using a specialist electronic trading platform (ETP). At present, Russia has only one ETP, the automated system for bidding for government defense contracts (AST-GOZ) created in 2017 by Sberbank (MOEX: SBER) and Rostec specifically for electronic procurement under the State Defense Order.
The question of law enforcement using electronic closed competition methods has been brought up in one form or another since 2017. This led the government in 2019 to determine that the Defense Ministry, the FSB and the SVR, and their companies must conduct tenders for government defense and security contracts in a closed process only, without announcing the details on the Unified Information System.
The plan was for this provision to be valid until the middle of 2019, by which time the law On the Contracting System (44-F3) would have been amended to regulate closed electronic tenders on a specialist ETP. However, the amendments were only prepared and passed this year, as part of the so-called second optimization package of amendments to 44-F3. A larger part of the latter, including the provisions to conduct closed tenders, is due to go into effect on January 1, 2022, meaning that the validity period of the provision on closed tenders for defense and security departments has had to be extended several times.