Bidding consortia: critical assessment of the revised horizontal guidelines

Bidding consortia may be very beneficial to the public sector but at the same time they can serve as bid rigging devices to eliminate competition. This article explains that this is not a mere theoretical consideration by briefly discussing some illustrative European cases that involved consortia or cooperative joint ventures between undertakings taking part in a public procurement procedure, which were held to be against Article 101 (1) TFEU. The article then focuses on the EC Revised Guidelines for the assessment of horizontal co-operation agreements 2022 and critically examines to what extent they managed to shed light on the conditions under which economic operators may submit joint tenders without infringing EU competition law.