Kuba's transparency agenda

Industry Minister Martin Kuba, who is quickly consolidating his power within ODS and on the industry front, told HN that the new public-procurement law went a bit overboard in the media hype for greater transparency. He and Justice Minister Pavel Blažek (also ODS) want to fix this by making it so that price is not necessarily the most important factor in public procurement and so that a tender with only one qualified bidder is possible. Makes sense in some cases, you might say, except for the fact that the law already deals with these two issues in the appropriate cases. What Kuba actually seems to be saying is that there is now too much transparency and that his mandate from ODS is to reintroduce more opaqueness. Under the Kuba-Blažek amendment, it seems that a "preferred" bidder would be able to set its own price, even if several other bidders offering equal quality were prepared to beat it.