Assigning a Certain Priority Percentage to the National Products
Recently, the Ministry of Finance has launched the preliminary draft of the new Governmental Tenders & Procurement Regulations, in order to enhance the principle of transparency and sharing, and for purposes of enabling all private and governmental concerned authorities to review this initial draft, aiming to express and show their suggestions and recommendations to avoid mistakes repetitions, and handling weakness points and gaps. This is due that these regulations represent the highest significance to enhance economic development, which is the main factor of commercial and investment businesses, in order to cope with VISION 2030 of the Kingdom.
The new Regulations have several changes, including as important as the following: –
- Establishing Strategies Procurement Department, to be in general concerned with the governmental repeated purchase such as stationery.
- Supporting medium and small establishments, and encouraging the same to participate and compete, to apply the principle of equality and equal opportunities.
- Introducing new methods of conflict resolution during execution, in addition to a variety of contracting methods, as the previous regulations contain only public tendering and direct purchase, and pre-planning, i.e., all projects are to be tendered during a year to arrange related issues.
The previous regulations hadn’t mentioned any issues related to assigning priority level to the national products more than foreign products, as find that Article (5), stipulates that “Priority is to be for national industries, products and services, and the same), and we could summarize this as follows: The Saudi Regulations stipulate to assign priority to the national products, services and commodities.
This is a great marginalization and diminution to the foreign investment in the Kingdom, which is directly reflected in the national interest, thus it is a must to assign and define a certain percentage, exactly such as the Egyptian legislations concerning tenders and bids regulations No. (98/89), in which Article(16), stipulates , in the 3rd paragraph, as follows: – “ Tender submitted to supplies of local production, or of works or services performed by Egyptian entities, is considered lower price, only if it is only 15% increase more than the value of the foreign least tender”. We find here that the Egyptian law defines priority of the Egyptian products against the foreign products, only in a percentage of 15% more than the least foreign tender, as an increase in the national tender, to be considered as the lowest price.
Therefore, we require assigning a national product priority to be not less than 10%, against the foreign products. This priority is applied due to the several benefits aspects for the nation, whether in terms of enabling employment opportunities to the national citizens, and enhancing the national income, in addition to supporting local products will bring benefits to Homeland and citizens, and guaranteeing fair participation for the foreign investors in tendering to achieve the highest degree of economic competency.
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