Four changes to the rules that govern how public money is spent, all of them moving in the last seven days, and none of them announced as procurement news.
Ghana — the prosecutor may need a constitutional amendment
Deputy Attorney-General Dr Justice Srem-Sai said on 26 July that Ghana cannot create an independent prosecutorial authority without amending Article 88 of the 1992 Constitution. His remark followed a High Court decision on the Office of the Special Prosecutor, the body that brings Ghana’s procurement and corruption cases. The OSP was created by ordinary legislation in 2017, and the argument is that ordinary legislation cannot grant it independence from the Attorney-General. A Supreme Court judgment on the OSP’s prosecutorial powers was expected on 29 July. If the constitutional reading holds, the office that investigates public contracts in Ghana is operating on a weaker footing than its own statute assumed.
Romania — three PNRR milestones are now in front of a court
The PSD has filed to suspend twelve decisions adopted by the dismissed Bolojan cabinet, arguing that a government removed by a no-confidence vote holds only caretaker powers and cannot adopt policies with long-term effects. Three of the contested decisions are PNRR milestones: the reorganisation of the Ministry of Agriculture, the procedure for housing and transition benefits for disabled adults, and the National Biodiversity Conservation Strategy 2026-2030. The biodiversity milestone alone is tied to €972.4M. The government’s position is that if the strategy does not enter into force by 31 August, Romania faces penalties in the region of a billion euros — and the PSD’s own argument concedes the strategy’s reach, naming road infrastructure, the Neptun Deep gas project and new hydroelectric development among what it affects.
Nepal — Article 41, invoked for ten million licences
The Department of National Identity and Civil Registration is buying ten million biometric identification licences from the French group IN Groupe without competition, relying on the clause of the Public Procurement Act that permits direct purchase where a single supplier holds exclusive rights or where proprietary goods must come from the existing supplier to preserve compatibility. The unit price, 0.0995 euros, is unchanged from 2019. The compatibility argument is real — the group’s predecessor companies have supplied the system since 2010 — but officials have not published the reasoning that the exemption requires.
United Kingdom — thresholds went down, not up
Worth restating because it runs against intuition: the Procurement Act 2023 thresholds were revised from 1 January 2026, and for most contract types they fell. Lower thresholds mean more contracts sit inside the Act’s full regime — the advertising duties, the mandatory timescales, the transparency obligations. The revision happens every two years to track currency movements and keep the UK aligned with its commitments under the WTO Government Procurement Agreement, so this is arithmetic rather than policy. The effect on a buyer’s workload is the same either way.
Three of these four are about the machinery that checks procurement rather than procurement itself — who may prosecute, who may decide, who must justify an exemption. That machinery is usually invisible until it stops working, and it tends to change in weeks like this one, when nobody is filing it under public contracts.
Reported from MyJoyOnline, Economedia, Cursdeguvernare, the Kathmandu Post and UK government threshold guidance, 21 to 27 July 2026. The Tender Wire is published by Otnox.
