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German lawmakers are rebelling against government plans to award hundreds of millions of euros in weapons contracts without public tenders, hampering efforts to speed up arms procurement.
Members of the Bundestag’s budget committee told the Financial Times they will not accept plans for the military procurement agency to award a contract to the Munich-based electronics group Rohde & Schwarz to develop a mobile reconnaissance system without competition.
“Taxpayers are spending a lot of money on defence capabilities. They have the right to know that procurement offices are really buying the best products at the best price,” said committee member Andreas Mattfeldt, who is from the ruling Christian Democrats.
The committee, which must scrutinise and approve government-funded defence projects worth more than €25mn, has asked officials not to submit the so-called MAUS project in its current form. MPs say it is likely to be worth several hundred million euros.
“This will be submitted to the committee at some point, when it has been put out to tender, but not as a direct award,” Mattfeldt said.
The dispute over the project comes after the newspaper Welt am Sonntag reported last weekend that the government planned to hand a €390mn contract to the German arms giant Rheinmetall to develop a prototype laser system to be used by the navy against drones and missiles without a call for tenders.
The decision to commission Rheinmetall reportedly came despite the fact that Australian company Electro Optic Systems, which also has a subsidiary in Germany, is already manufacturing a similar product that has been acquired by some Nato member states.
Social Democrat committee member Andreas Schwarz, whose party is the junior partner in the coalition led by chancellor Friedrich Merz, said that direct contracts could be used for certain off-the-shelf military products.
But he added that the development of a new system in a field with multiple possible contenders should be decided by an open process. “A direct award to a single provider without competition cannot be the solution,” he said.
Mattfeldt and Schwarz were backed by Sebastian Schäfer, from the opposition Green party, who said the vast amounts of money due to be spent in the years ahead made it “all the more important to strictly adhere to open tendering procedures and competition”.
Europe’s largest economy plans to dramatically increase military spending in the years ahead in response to Russia’s war in Ukraine and declining US interest in European security.
Merz, who took the radical step of allowing unlimited borrowing to fund the armed forces after winning parliamentary elections in February, has promised to make the German armed forces the “strongest conventional army in Europe” after years of neglect.
To fund that effort, the country’s defence budget is set to reach €162bn by 2029, when support for Ukraine is included — a 70 per cent increase on this year.
But parliament could be one of the brakes on the efforts to spend the vast sums, both due to bottlenecks caused by the record number of submissions that it will be asked to consider and due to tensions over some of the decisions.
The German defence ministry declined to comment on specific procurement projects. But it said that the possibility of using direct awards was one of several measures in a new procurement acceleration law recently approved by the cabinet.
The bill, it said, was intended “to help ensure that equipment and materials reach the troops more quickly in the future” and increase the operational readiness of the armed forces.
Direct awarding, it said, was especially intended to be used when procuring “interoperable systems jointly with our partners”.
Rohde & Schwarz and Rheinmetall declined to comment.
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