In the autumn of 2020, the Minister of Transport proposed a new 'sin' for which an entrepreneur could be excluded from participating in public procurement – a bad reputation. At the time, it was a political reaction to the conflict between the Prime Minister and the Minister of Transport regarding the intercity bus transport market. Recently, this initiative, fanned by various winds and the construction cartel, has created a situation where the Saeima is being asked to reform public procurement in such a way that it would be very difficult for an honest Latvian company to win. Why?

To prevent the corruption pit that would be created by including an unclear reputation criterion in the Public Procurement Law, all organisations and institutions that deal with procurement on a daily basis agreed to support the Ministry of Finance's (FM) plan. The Public Procurement Law already provides for ten 'sins' for which those who commit them cannot continue to participate in procurement – tax debts, employment violations, Competition Council penalties, etc. The FM proposed replacing the aforementioned 'bad reputation' with new, additional criteria for which companies are excluded from participating in procurement. The first problem with these criteria was that they were hastily pulled from the Ministry of Finance's drawer and formally approved by the Cabinet of Ministers within five days.