Latvia makes bid rigging a crime: the law reaches 4% of contracts and 80% of contract value

On 24 September the Saeima voted 68 to 12 to make bid rigging a crime. From 15 October 2026, a person who rigs a public procurement contract worth at least €750,000 excluding VAT, or €1 million for construction works, faces up to five years in prison and a ban on business activity, an occupation or holding office. We applied those thresholds to the contracts Latvian buyers signed in 2025, as published in EIS open data. 4.3% of those contracts clear them, and they hold about 80% of recorded contract value. The law is not retroactive; the figures show its scale.

1. What becomes a crime

Article 211.1 covers three kinds of agreement with another market participant: coordinating an application or offer on any of its essential terms before it is submitted, agreeing not to submit one, and agreeing on the terms of participation. The bill's explanatory note limits it to conduct that Article 11 of the Competition Law already prohibits; the change is that the people involved can now be prosecuted. The thresholds sit in a separate law and apply to the price of the contract the agreement concerned.

A Criminal Procedure Law amendment adopted 90 to 0 on 1 October, and not yet in force, provides that a criminal case under Article 211.1 may start on a referral from the Competition Council.

2. Why it took three years

In 2021 the Competition Council found ten construction companies in a cartel and fined nine of them €16.65 million in total; the tenth had been liquidated. They had met at least 12 times between 2015 and 2018 and discussed about 90 procurements. At least 70 of them, worth €687 million, were identified, among them the Mežaparks open-air stage, the New Riga Theatre and the Ventspils concert hall. The evidence came from covert recordings made by KNAB, the anti-corruption bureau.

On 23 December 2025 the Senate, Latvia's highest court, ruled those recordings unusable: the law on covert investigations did not then allow such material to be used to catch cartels. It sent the case back to the regional court. The Saeima has since amended that law, in force from June 2026, to allow such transfers with approval and safeguards; that does not settle the returned case. The Prosecutor General's office had argued since 2023 that fraud charges fail because the buyer's loss cannot be proven. The Saeima rejected the idea in September 2024 and returned to it in January 2026.

3. Where the threshold landed

The first reading in February set the threshold at €100,000. In June an amendment raised it to €3 million, and in September it settled at €750,000, or €1 million for works, after KNAB objected to €3 million and proposed the figures that passed.

Moving from €3 million to the final figures brought 694 more contracts and about €1 billion more into scope. Works clear the line most often: 7.5% of 2025 construction contracts were worth €1 million or more, against 3–4% of goods and services contracts.

4. Latvia next to its neighbours

Opponents in the Saeima pointed to Estonia, which took cartel offences out of its Penal Code in 2025 and now handles them through administrative and misdemeanour proceedings. Latvia went the other way and now sits with Germany and the UK.

5. What to do before 15 October

For bidders above the thresholds, the situations to check are joint bids with a firm that could have bid alone, subcontracting to a competitor, and any contact with competitors about prices or about who bids. None of these is a crime in itself; an agreement on the bids is. The Council's joint bidding guidelines include a self-assessment tool. The Council says firms often use joint bids "as a cover for a cartel". Write down why each partnership exists. Because the liability is personal, the people who sign bids need to know where the line is.

For buyers, the Competition Council is where suspicions go, and its cases depend on what buyers notice. Its signal list for contracting authorities covers the patterns. Bid rigging made up 80% of the cartel infringements it fined in the five years to 2022. In 2025 it gave buyers 18 opinions on suspected collusion and worked on a data-analysis screening project with KNAB and two universities.

Most of those patterns only show up across many tenders: the same firms meeting again and again, or wins that take turns. Tendergate's bidder pages are built from EIS open data. For every company they show who it bids against, how the wins split between any two firms, and which firms bid most often for a given buyer. It does not detect cartels. It puts the bidding history in one place, so a buyer with doubts can check it before writing to the Council.

How we counted. We took every contract record (not amendments) signed in 2025 from the EIS results dataset on data.gov.lv, left out unregulated purchases, and removed 1,191 records that repeat the same procurement, lot, winner and value. Each procurement's subject (works, goods or services) comes from the EIS notice datasets for 2021 to 2025 and the 2025 opening data; 723 records worth €1.28 billion with no recorded subject were left out. That leaves 24,279 contracts worth €8.17 billion. Framework agreements (2,218 records, €1.83 billion) count at their ceiling, which is not money spent; without them the thresholds cover 3.8% of contracts and 79% of value. We compared the recorded contract values with the statutory thresholds, which apply to contract price excluding VAT.