X-officio (Ohad Graber-Soudry) recently contributed a chapter on procurement by ERICs to the prestigious Discretion in EU Public Procurement Law, Studies of the Oxford Institute of European and Comparative Law by Hart Publishing, See here.
The chapter discusses the regulatory framework that underlines ERIC procurement activity and the limits of the discretion ERICs enjoy in formulating their own procurement rules. This is done by looking at relevant obligations derived from EU law, the EU public procurement regime and the EU legal framework for ERICs that is aimed at addressing the special needs of major European research infrastructures by granting these, inter alia, the ability to adopt their own procurement procedures in a similar way to international organisations.
The chapter concludes with the submission that although ERICs are exempt from the scope of the EU directives on public procurement, they remain subject to the EU Treaty and the general EU principles applicable to procurement as interpreted by the Court of Justice of the European Union. This is despite the assumed intention behind the ERIC Regulation to grant ERICs the possibility to develop a fully independent procurement regime in a similar way as other international organisations, such as CERN or ESO. The also means that, when compared with other international organisations, ERICs are more restricted in the development of their procurement rules, they may have less freedom to deviate from established EU policy and related obligations and they may be subject to more scrutiny by national courts and the CJEU.