S.L. 601.5 Art. 127Public supply contracts.

The negotiated procedure without prior publication may be used for public supply contracts in the following instances:

(a) where no tenders or no suitable tenders or no requests to participate or no suitable requests to participate have been submitted in response to a procedure with a prior call for competition, provided that the initial conditions of the contract are not substantially altered;

(b) where a contract is purely for the purpose of research, experiment, study or development, and not for the purpose of securing a profit or of recovering research and development costs, and insofar as the award of such contract does not prejudice the competitive award of subsequent contracts which do seek, in particular, those ends;

(c) where the supplies can be supplied only by a particular economic operator for any of the following reasons:

(i) the aim of the procurement is the creation or acquisition of a unique work of art or artistic performance;

(ii) competition is absent for technical reasons;

(iii) the protection of exclusive rights, including intellectual property rights: Provided that the exceptions set out in sub-paragraphs

(ii) and (iii) shall only apply when no reasonable alternative or substitute exists and the absence of competition is not the result of an artificial narrowing down of the parameters of the procurement;

(d) in so far as is strictly necessary where, for reasons of extreme urgency brought about by events unforeseeable by the contracting entity, the time limits laid down for open procedures, restricted procedures and negotiated procedures with prior call for competition cannot be complied with. The circumstances invoked to justify extreme urgency shall not in any event be attributable to the contracting entity;

(e) in the case of supply contracts for additional deliveries by the original supplier which are intended either as a partial replacement of supplies or installations or as the extension of existing supplies or installations, where a change of supplier would oblige the contracting entity to acquire supplies having different technical characteristics which would result in incompatibility or disproportionate technical difficulties in operation and maintenance;

(f) for supplies quoted and purchased on a commodity market;

(g) for bargain purchases, where it is possible to procure supplies by taking advantage of a particularly advantageous opportunity available for a very short time at a price considerably lower than normal market prices;

(h) for purchases of supplies under particularly advantageous conditions from either a supplier which is definitively winding up its business activities or the liquidator in an insolvency procedure, an arrangement with creditors or a similar procedure under national laws or regulations.