Changes to the project for the new Bidding Law, approved at the end of last year and which continues on an urgent basis in the plenary of the Chamber of Deputies is debated by the Jair Bolsonaro government and parliamentarians.

The main change envisaged by the economic team is the defense of three adaptations: removing the possibility of a margin of preference for national suppliers in bids, a minimum of 30% for guarantee insurance in projects with values ​​above R$ 200 million and a determination for the electronic auction in the lowest price mode to be opened.

Deputy Felipe Rigoni (PSB-ES) managed to include in the project the amendment that establishes a deadline for measuring works carried out and reduces the maximum time for payment of construction companies by the public authorities. Today, the law does not stipulate a deadline for measuring the works, attesting whether or not they were properly executed. When it is done, the contractor in the public sector still has 90 days to make the payment. Only after that time, if the disbursement does not occur, can the contractor request the unilateral termination of the contract without being subject to penalties.

Rigoni wants measurement by engineers to have deadlines defined in the contract. When not contractually specified, the measurement would be monthly. After the measurement, payment would have to be made within 30 days.

This change meets requests from the construction sector, which has been highly critical of the lack of payment and delays by the federal, state and municipal governments as factors that not only harm companies, but also favor corruption. “When there is discontinuity or unpredictability in payments, the flow of a work or the construction company itself can be broken, especially the medium and small ones”, says Rigoni.

On the government side, one of the requests is the removal of the entire chapter that deals with the establishment of margins of preference for local suppliers. The current text foresees margins of up to 20% in favor of national companies. This means that, even offering a price up to 20% higher than that of a foreign supplier (or outside the State in the case of state tenders), the local company is chosen.

“It is a disastrous possibility”, said the secretary of Advocacy for Competition and Competitiveness (Seae) of the Ministry of Economy, César Mattos. For him, the proposal reflects a protectionist stance and contradicts the discourse of broad opening of the economy of the current government.

This policy was widely used in previous governments, first for bids for the Growth Acceleration Program (PAC), and with more impetus from 2011, when the Greater Brazil Plan was launched.

A still undefined point in the text that will be voted on in plenary is the maintenance of an article that prohibits, in practice, contractors in judicial or extrajudicial recovery from participating in bids. By requiring a negative debt certificate from companies, the legislation could distance public tenders from giants such as OAS, Mendes Júnior and Triunfo.

The proposal for a new bidding law, modernizing the infamous 8.666/93, was approved in the Senate in 2016. Since then, little progress has been made. It was only at the end of last year that it gained new impetus, after being analyzed by a special committee. At the beginning of the current legislature, it gained the stamp of urgency – thus, it becomes a priority item on the agenda in plenary.

Petrobras changes statute to sell subsidiaries without shareholder support