ABSTRACT
Competitive dialogue is one of the most important novelties in the EU public procurement regime. It is well known that the objective of the introduction of the procedure of competitive dialogue was to achieve procedural simplification and to make the EU public procurement regime more flexible. 1 This is also spelled out in the Explanatory Note on Competitive Dialogue from the European Commission 2 where it is mentioned that the procedure was introduced in the Public Sector Directive 2004/18/EC in response to the finding that the ‘old’ Directives, Directives 92/50/EEC, 93/96/EEC and 93/37/EEC, did not offer sufficient flexibility with certain particularly complex projects due to the fact that the use of negotiated procedures with publication of a contract note is limited solely to the cases exhaustively listed in the Directives.
