On March 23, 2016 a press conference was held in "Media Center" on "Development Trends of Public Procurement 2015." The speakers of the press conference were Varuzhan Hoktanyan, Executive Director and Artak Manukyan, Public Procurement Policy Expert of Transparency International Anticorruption Center (TIAC). It is for 9 years that TIAC has carried out public procurement monitoring with the assistance of Open Society Foundations- Armenia. This time TIAC focused on monitoring of 3 components – single source procurement, complaint system and framework agreements.

The main problem of the high share of single source procurement, is still unchanged. According to last year’s 9 months’ data, in procurement volume of 170 billion drams (urban communities are not included) carried out by the government bodies, a single source purchase in monetary terms accounted around 45%. For the same time period, according to the quantitative data (based on the number of transactions), volume of a single source procurements accounted for 69% of the entire system. State administration bodies, under the framework agreements, carried out 74 billion drams of purchases, which by monetary volumes accounted for 45% of the total procurement.

According to Artak Manukyan, Public Procurement Policy Expert at Transparency International Anti-Corruption Center, quantitative data of single-source procurement transactions in Armenia are quite close to Belarus and Russia, in those countries 65% and 51%, respectively. "But here is a big difference; Russia and Belarus are countries with large state-owned property, and it, somehow, explains why these numbers are so big, but Armenia has no such problem. The situation in Armenia is specified by market concentration and corruption," he added, informing that, according to the World Bank data, the number of single-source procurement transactions in the whole procurement volume should not exceed 10%.

See press release by Media Center.