Visiting Scholars

Isabel Gallego (1 July - 30 September 2015)

Dr. Isabel Gallego is Associate Professor of Administrative Law at University of Castilla-La Mancha (Spain). 

Dr Gallego is currently working on a monograph that examines procurement procedures.  During her stay at the University of Nottingham, Dr Gallego will study both the European and the UK Law on this matter. 

As the new European Legislative package on Public Procurement seeks a flexibilisation of the procedural regime, her research analyses whether this aim has been effectively achieved. In this context, she will focus especially on procedures that include a negotiation stage.

Dainius Kenstavicius (18 July - 15 August 2015)

Dainius Kenstavicius teaches law at Mykolas Romeris University, Vilnius, Lithuania. He is also attorney at law and represents clients in the field of public procurement law. 

During his stay at the PPRG, Dainius will carry out research in the fields of  European Public Procurement and European Competition Law; this forms part of his doctoral thesis entitled "The Security of Competition in Public Procurement".

Annika Engelbert (1-12 December 2014)

Annika Engelbert is a PhD student at the Institute of Development Research and Development Policy (IEE), Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.

As a research associate at the Chair of Public Law (Development Law), she is currently working on a project on procurement law and anti-corruption in Sub-Saharan Africa, funded by the Fritz Thyssen Foundation.

Following a two week field research in Ghana in November, Annika would like to seize the opportunity of working with PPRG to intensify her analysis of contemporary legal approaches to prevention and sanctioning of corruption in public procurement, and to integrate findings from expert interviews into preliminary – theoretical - results.

The case study on Ghana shall be put in a comparative perspective with previous work on public procurement systems in East Africa. Implementation issues reflected in recent legislative reform efforts will be taken into account as well as the relevance of sound public procurement systems within the larger framework of good financial governance.

Dr Eva Katharina Sarter (8-30 September 2014)

Dr. Eva Katharina Sarter is a researcher at the Faculty of Sociology of the University of Bielefeld in Germany. She holds a doctoral degree in political science from the Free University Berlin. Her areas of research lie in the field of Welfare States and social policies as well as the intersection of law and politics with special emphasis on the European Court of Justice.

Her current research focuses on the interaction between Welfare States and the market in a European perspective. Taking public procurement as one of the fields in which the boundaries between social considerations and the market are negotiated, she is interested in the legal and political interplay of public procurement regulations on the one hand and Welfare states and their social policies on the other.

In particular, she is interested in the impact of European public procurement legislation on European Welfare States. In addition to this, she is part of a research project on social standards and social value in public procurement in European comparison, which is based at the University of Bielefeld.

Dr Lale Burcu Önüt (23 June-23 July 2014)

Lale Burcu Önüt is Assistant Professor in Administrative Law in the University of Dokuz Eylül (Turkey). She holds an LLM degree from the University of Dokuz Eylül (2006) and from the University Montesquieu- Bordeaux IV (maîtrise-2008). 

Her master thesis is entitled “Public Procurement of Services in the European Community (Union) Law”. She has also a PhD in public law from the University of Dokuz Eylül (2012). The title of her PHD thesis is “The Execution of European Union Law in Member States”. Her main area of research is European and Turkish public procurement law.

During her visit at the PPRG she will analyse public procurement procedures in the light of the new EU directive 2014/24. She will examine the implementation of principles which dominate public procurement procedures in EU member states. 

She will also analyse whether the Turkish legislation and practice relating to the public procurement law is compatible with the legal framework of the European Union. In this context the effect of EU public procurement law to a non-EU country (Turkey) will be assessed.

Andrea Sundstrand (28th April-2nd May 2014) 

Project title: Overriding reasons of public interest in public procurement

Andrea's research explores the possibilities in EU law to refer to over-riding reasons of public interest when conducting public procurement procedures, and to analyse whether the Swedish legislation and practice in this area is consistent with the legal framework of the European Union.  

The EU public procurement legal framework is based on the principle of equal treatment in Article 18 TFEU and on its provisions on the free movement of goods, services, and capital in the European Union.

Comparisons with other Member States will be made to understand how these questions have been solved. The UK is one of the selected case studies and Andrea will examine the UK public procurement rules while in Nottingham as a PPRG visitor.

According to the case law of the European Court of Justice (CJEU) it is only possible to restrict these freedoms of movement if there is an explicit exclusion in EU law, or if there is an overriding reason of public interest. In the latter case, the Member State shall be able to demonstrate that the relevant measure is non-discriminatory, justified by overriding reasons of general interest, suitable for securing the attainment of the objective pursued and does not go beyond what is necessary to achieve that goal. Swedish contracting authorities, units and courts today have little or no knowledge of the application and the delimitation of the exemptions from public procurement. The project is important to clarify the boundaries of any discrepancies and determine in which cases it is possible in a public procurement procedure to refer to an overriding reason of public interest.

And also...

April 2010

Andrea was also our visiting scholar in April 2010, where she researched public procurement outside the EU Directives, such as concessions, part B services and  below thresholds procurement.

Her research included the questions on what procurements are excluded from the EU Directives, in what legislatory framework these excluded procurements would be regulated and what the obligations are for procurements regulated only by the EU Treaties. The research also includes examining whether Sweden has managed to regulate these excluded procurements properly.

During her stay at Nottingham, Andrea was looking further into the definition and meaning of the term "certain crossborder interest", stated by the EU Court in its jurisprudence. By stating that some procurements falling outside the EU legislatory framework may have a certain crossborder interest, the EU Court has implied that these procurements could be caught by the articles of the EU Treaties and the basic principles of EU law.  

María Czestochowa Martínez Fuentes (3rd-31st March 2014)

Maria's PhD thesis, titled 'Damages in the Field of European Public Procurement' aims to analyse  the state of law, legal foundation and the conditions that apply to  the remedy of damages in different EU member states. Furthermore, it also aims to highlight practical problems and conflictive issues within each national approach that hinder the effectiveness of this remedy.

This will be done through the examination of national law and the developed jurisprudence on the subject, as well as practitioners' experience in the field of European Public Procurement Law. Maria's PhD thesis will make suggestions and recommendations as to how the effectiveness of this remedy can be better enhanced.  

Dr Mari Ann Simovart (17-26 June 2013)

Dr Mari Ann Simovart is lecturer at the Faculty of Law of the  University of Tartu in Estonia. During her visit at the PPRG she will research the topics of procurement contract amendments and remedies in case of improper amendments, in the light of the proposals for the new procurement directives.

Her visit is supported by the European Social Fund’s Doctoral Studies and Internationalisation Programme DoRa, which is carried out by Foundation Archimedes.

and also...

September 2009

Mari Ann was also our visiting scholar in September 2009, where she researched the  influence of general principles of the EC procurement law upon application of contract law to procurement contracts. 

In Nottingham, she studied legislative solutions of different Member States to regulate procurement contracts in view of the above mentioned issues (amendment, termination and social policies); and looked  into the options of contracting authority’s discretion in preparing contract conditions versus pre-prepared, officially approved (or confirmed by the law) contract terms.

Her trip was financed by European Social Fund and Archimedes Foundation.

Dr Patricia Valcárcel Fernández (June-July 2012)

Patricia Valcárcel Fernández is Associate Professor in Administrative Law in the University of Vigo (Spain). She has published different works on Public Procurement, field in which has got her PhD in 2002, with a Thesis titled: “Execution and financing of public Works”. She is a member of the  Spanish Public Procurement Observatory  (http://www.obcp.es/)) 

Nowadays, she has initiated a new research about the limits of the principles of transparency and competition in Public Procurement. During her stay in the University of Nottingham she will study the English doctrine on the above, and would be glad to share knowledge and professional experiences with the members of the PPRG.

Tianhao Chu (September 2010-September 2011)

Tianhao is currently a PhD candidate at the Institute of Defence Economics and Management (IDEM), Central University of Finance and Economics (CUFE) in China, and who visited Nottingham in the framework of the EU Asia Link programme. 

Tianhao visited the PPRG from September 2010 to September 2011. During his stay Tianhao carried out comparative research of international conventions dealing with e-procurement and study the UK experience in the field. His visit is sponsored by the China Scholarship Council (CSC, China).

Leonardo Fernandes dos Anjos (September-December 2010)

Leonardo is a Research Fellow in Economic Law at the Department of Law of the University Center of João Pessoa - UNIPÊ (Brazil) and member of the Brazilian and Portuguese Bar Associations. 

Leonardo will be at the PPRG from September 2010 until December 2010. During his stay Leonardo will examine the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) of the WTO, as well as other recently concluded bilateral agreements between countries that do not participate in the GPA, and analyse the potential of these intrenational trade rules as a tools for economic and social development.

Prof. dr. Francesco Goisis and Prof. dr. Sara Valaguzza (May 2010)

Professors Goisis and Valaguzza visited us from the State University of Milan, Law School, Department of Public and European Law. 

They are conducting a research project on the implementation of the new Remedies Directive (2007/66/EC) in a variety of Member States; during their time in Nottingham they will focus on the UK.

Their analysis will involve not only an examination of formal-legal implementation, but also of factual and structual implementation, to the extent that this might impact on the effectiveness of the remedies.

The research will specifically consider powers of the national court; the relationship between judicial review and EU remedies; and the relationship between annulment of the award of a contract and the contract itself (in particular, the concept of ineffectiveness of contracts).

Carina Risvig Hansen (April-June 2010) 

Carina Risvig Hansen is a PhD student at Copenhagen Business School who visited Nottingham as a part of the Asia Link program. She has a degree in Law from the University of Aarhus from 2006 and is currently working on a PhD Thesis with the title: "Public contracts that are not covered – or fully covered - by the Public Procurement Directive", which is due to be completed in October 2012. Carina is also working part time for the Danish Competition Authority (which is the Authority responsible for public procurement legislation in Denmark). 

The overall aim of her PhD thesis is to analyze what rules apply for contracting authorities when awarding a contract that are not covered or fully covered by the Public Procurement Directives. The project focuses on contracts of a value that falls below the thresholds of the Public Procurement Directive, contracts that are listed in Annex II B of the Directive and contracts regarding service concessions.  Her thesis will furthermore look at the enforcement rules and remedies regarding the above three types of contracts. 

During her time in Nottingham she expects to collect materials for her thesis, write chapters on the definitions of the three aforementioned types of procurement contracts, and to share experiences and thoughts with members of the PPRG.  

Fred Kan (February-March 2010)

Fred Kan visited the PPRG during February and March of 2010.  Over the years Fred has held a number of prestigious positions such as Deputy Chairman of the Hong Kong Review Body on Bid Challenges (under the WTO Government Procurement Agreement), Council Member of the Law Society of Hong Kong from 1997 to 2002, Chairman of its External Affairs Standing Committee, Council Member of the Hong Kong International Arbitration Centre, Member of the Macau Law Reform Advisory Committee, Hon. Legal Advisor to the Hong Kong Institute of Planners to name but a few.

During his stay at Nottingham Fred read and researched into the monitoring mechanisms established in major member-states of the GPA and the problems and challenges confronting China upon its accession to the GP.

Ximena Lazo Vitoria (October 2009)

Ximena Lazo Vitoria is a Professor of Administrative Law at the University of Alcalá in Spain.  She came  to Nottingham specifically to do research on a comparative project on competitive dialogue that aims to compare the approaches of Spain, the UK and other countries. 

Spain's regulation of competitive dialogue is quite general and leaves various aspects of the procedure unsolved; despite this, contracting authorities are using it regularly.  The comparative analysis will hopefully provide some criteria necessary to guide the authorities in their use of the procedure.

Vera Eiró (February-April 2009)

Vera Eiró is a PhD student at the Nova University of Lisbon's School of Law (Portugal) and who visited the PPRG until the end of April 2009.  She has a degree in Law (Nova University) and post-graduate studies in Environmental and Planning Law (University of Coimbra School of Law).

Vera has been a trainee and an associate at Linklaters LLP (Lisbon Office, Public Law) and has recently worked in the Portuguese Constitutional Court as an assistant to a Judge.

Vera's PhD subject is damages under Public Procurement Remedies Directives. During her visit she expects to collect materials to her thesis, to write the main thesis chapters regarding EU Public Procurement Law and to share experiences with the other PPLRG members.

Vera received a scholarship from the Portuguese Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation (through FCT) that funds her PhD studies and that covers her expenses while staying in Nottingham.

Dr Su Miaohan (2009)

Dr Su Miaohan, lecturer in the Law School of the Central University of Finance and Economy (China), visited the University in 2009 as part of the Asia Link programme.

He has a PhD in administrative law from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences (2008). He has worked with the Energy Law Drafting Group in the Chinese government since 2006, and his PhD thesis is entitled "Regulatory System of the Energy Industry in China".

During his visit to Nottingham, he will attend classes and collect materials with the aim to develop a module on Public Procurement Law back in his own university in China. He is also interested in difficulties arising from energy and environmental considerations in public procurement policy

Professor José Pernas García (December 2008)

José Pernas García, professor of administrative law of the University of Coruña (Spain), visited the School of Law of the University of Nottingham during december 2008.

He has a PhD in administrative law from the University of Coruña (2003). His mains areas of research are environmental law and public procurement. Recently he has published a book in Spain about in-house providing and the jurisprudence of the Court of Justice of the European Union (“Las operaciones in house y el Derecho comunitario de contratos públicos”, Iustel, Madrid, 2008).

During his visit to the University of Nottingham he collected and analyzed materials on in-house procurement in the European Union and in the English system specifically to finish an article about this subject. He was interested also in examining how to deal with environmental issues in public procurement from a comparative point of view.

Dr Anna Gorczynska (September 2008)

Dr Anna Gorczysnka, lecturer in the Department of European Law at the University of Lodz, visited the University for one week in September 2008.  She is the author of a PhD entitled "Public Procurement in the European Community: Issues of Substantive Law".  Her main research interests are European and Polish public procurement law, public-private partnership (PPP) regulation, and the regulation of structural funds.

She gives lectures at the undergraduate, postgraduate and professional level in the field of public procurement and European commercial law.  In 2006, she was promoted to Head of Postgraduate Studies on EU structural funds.  In the past 8 years, Dr. Gorczynska has also been working for the Office of the President of the Lodz Region as Head of the International Cooperation Unit.  Most recently, in 2008, she has become the national coordinator for the ERA-ARD programme.

Her current research involves an analysis of the laws regulating public-private partnerships, and specifically, how the competitive dialogue procedure can work for these.

Grith Ølykke (January-May 2008)

Grith Ølykke, PhD student at the Copenhagen Business School, visited the University until the 1st of May.  She has a Master of Science in Commercial Law and Business Administration from Copenhagen Business School and is currently working on a project entitled "Liberalisation of the public welfare service 'passenger transport by railway' in Denmark", which is due to be completed in March 2010. 

She received a scholarship from the Danish Ministry of Science, Technology and Innovation to cover her expenses while staying in Nottingham.

Azahari Abdul Aziz, (August-October 2007)

Azahari Abdul Aziz, Senior Law Lecturer at the MARA University of Technology, will be visiting the University for three months from August 2007 under the PPRG’s Visiting Scholars’ scheme. He has been teaching law at the MARA University of Technology since 1990. 

He is currently working on a PhD entitled “The Future of Secondary Policies in Government Procurement in ASEAN Countries” under the supervision of Prof Dr Rahmat Mohamad (Deputy Vice-Chancellor of UiTM) – who is a former PhD student of Professor Sue Arrowsmith, Director of the PPRG. At the same time he is also writing a book on Government Procurement under the WTO in Bahasa Malaysia, which is expected to be published early in 2008.

During his visit to the University of Nottingham he will be collecting and analyzing materials on international procurement for the purposes of both his thesis and the book.

Francis Ssennoga (March 2007)

Francis Ssennoga is currently a Lecturer of International Sourcing and Public Procurement at Kyambogo University. Kyambogo University is the second biggest University in Uganda. It is one of the four Public Universities in the country.

Francis is undertaking Doctoral studies at the University of Twente, Netherlands on the integration of developing countries into the international trade regimes on public procurement. He holds a Master of Philosophy with a bias in Procurement and Supply Chain Management from Maastricht School of Management, Netherlands. He also holds a Master of Business Administration from Uganda Martyrs University. For his first degree Francis did a Bachelor of Education degree from Makerere University specialising in accounting, Management and Economics. Earlier he had acquired a diploma in Education.

Francis is a Director of Profima Consult, a consultancy firm incorporated in Uganda in 2006 to handle procurement, management and finance services. Francis is also a Managing Partner of Frachel consult, a consultancy firm with head offices in Uganda specialising in Accounting, Management and Civil works.

Francis is a co-founder and Deputy Project manager of Education Development Initiative (EDI) a Non Governmental Organisation aimed at enhancing Vocational Education in Uganda and equipping the massive number of Universal Primary Education (UPE) graduates with employable skills for self-sustenance.

Erik Marskner and Phoebe Bolton (2005/6)

In 2005/6, Erik Marskner, from Germany, spent several months with the Group researching the legal nature of the contract award decision from a comparative perspective, and Phoebe Bolton, lecturer at the University of the Western Cape, also spent a short period at the School working on material for her forthcoming book on public procurement in South Africa.